Reviews
A conservative and beautiful La Traviata, Welsh National Opera, Wales Millennium Centre
22nd September 2023What else can be done with La Traviata that has not been done already? Giuseppe Verdi’s most famous work, the one many regard as the quintessential opera, has been through such a huge number of incarnations, revisitations and reimaginings – some more fortunate than others – that one would be truly hard pressed to think […]
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Sublime theatre and music, Ainadamar, WNO, WMC
10th September 2023***** At the end of the performance of Osvaldo Golijov’s opera Ainadamar (Fountain of Tears) I felt surprisingly moved by this new work from the Argentinian composer that focusses on the murder of the poet Lorca during the Spanish Civil War. I am still not sure whether it was the music and singing or the […]
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Not just any old port in the storm, Les Troyens at the Proms, Albert Hall
5th September 2023**** It should be of no concern to this review why the conductor and the singer performing Narbal were not who was originally scheduled to perform. There is plenty reportage of this elsewhere. Anyone interested will know, and I was more concerned with the annoying distractions of the audience (some unavoidable with some of the […]
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The Mikado fun but without much bite, If Opera
1st September 2023This evening entertainment at If Opera’s summer festival, an offering of this Charles Court Opera version of The Mikado, was well-received by the audience. Judging by judicious eavesdropping, the audience members particularly enjoyed the humour and did not seem phased by the transposition of the Gilbert and Sullivan story to an all-British group of colonial […]
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Luscious and powerful Fedora at If Opera
1st September 2023***** Again, If Opera punches above its weight with this luscious and powerfully sung Fedora, an oddly underperformed opera by Umberto Giordano that on the evidence of this outing deserves to be taken on by other opera companies. Charne Rochford Yes, it has the usual operatic excesses of verismo opera, and Act One in particular, […]
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Intimate and contrasting staging, Double Bill, Waterperry Opera
21st August 2023Waterperry Opera Festival’ s new double bill of Acis and Galatea billed with Dido and Aeneas shows how effective the intimate staging in the Amphitheater is with a small cast taking different roles in the two operas. The Dido and Aeneas is played mainly by fire light and takes a particularly dark interpretation of the […]
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Never ending story, Tristan und Isolde, Bayreuth Festival
18th August 2023Now in its second season at this Wagnerian wonderland, director Roland Schwab’s Tristan und Isolde has again proven to be a favourite of the Bayreuth audience and this year – and that is without the context of contrasting with a seemingly deeply unpopular production of Der Ring des Nibelungen. There is always the risk with […]
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A tale of Nordic revenge, Die fliegende Hollander, Bayreuth Festival
18th August 2023A Flying Dutchman without any ship let alone any sea? A retelling of Wagner’s tale as a son’s revenge on a community that had driven his mother to suicide? Another mother’s killing of a madman who has taken control of the mind of her own rather mad daughter? Well, a director can take his Der […]
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Theatrical genius, Tannhauser, Bayreuth Festival
18th August 2023How can it be that your preconceptions of a production based on just seeing some performance photography can get it all so, so wrong? Theoretically, this production of Tannhauser for Wagner’s Festspielhaus should have been just what I loathe in contemporary stagings: merging actual performance with live video and pre-recordings, waving wokism in your face, […]
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A doubly surreal Parsifal, Bayreuth Festival
18th August 2023This new Parsifal for Bayreuth was really two productions: one for the small number of us with Augmented Reality glasses and the second for the vast majority of the audience without. While the embracing of whatever technology enhanced his own work was a hallmark of Richard Wagner, I doubt if he would have enjoyed this […]
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