Reviews
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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Heavenly Dialogues des Carmelites, BBC Proms, Royal Albert Hall
9th August 2023**** There were two surprises for me at the beginning of Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s production of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmelites performed as a semi-staged concert as part of BBC Proms. The first was how many people had come to the still quite rarely performed opera. The second was the acoustics when Robin Ticciati conducting the […]
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Pedaloing the green dream, The Fairy Queen, Longborough Festival Opera
31st July 2023Longborough Opera’s commitment to new and emerging talent takes the form of a fun and lively reimagining of Purcell’s Fairy Queen and a wider theme of renewal, regeneration, rejuvenation and rebirth. This fits in well with the youthful nature (no pun intended) of the players and other creatives for this multileveled fusion of musical and […]
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Grand designs, Le roi de Lahore, Dorset Opera Festival
28th July 2023**** Theatrically voluptuous, picturesquely medieval Indian, director Ella Marchment’s take on the neglected Massenet work plays well to the strengths of Dorset Opera; a knock-out, strong chorus, fine young players and singers, with expert guidance. The opera’s fantastical story is another tale of the mercifuly gods allowing a betrayed dead lover return to his beloved […]
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Nothing sheepish about this dressing up box Il re pastore, Buxton International Festival
21st July 2023**** When our singers started jigging along at the end of Il re pastore, having told us the Greek army is camped nearby and the shepherd king was tending his sheep, I half expected the Brecon Beacons National Park police to rush in and arrest them all. The connection between young Mozart’s take on Alexander […]
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