Reviews
Terfel triumphs, of course, in Grange Park Opera double bill
Aleko / Gianni Schicchi Grange Park Opera ***** Just when you think you have seen all there can be from Bryn Terfel along comes a new performance (or in this case two) that reminds just why the North Walian really deserves his star status. As if to showcase his abilities we have him cast in…
Kátya Kabanová, Janácek: a soprano of exceptional ability
***** Grange Park Opera From the powerhouse of a season, it would again seem Grange Park Opera is the place to hear our very finest British singers, and Swansea-born Natalya Romaniw as Kátya Kabanová is the perfect example. Add to that Sir Bryn Terfel in the double bill of Aleko and Gianni Schicchi and it…
Il trittico, reflections on the human condition, Welsh National Opera
**** Whether it was the arrival of Taylor Swift in town, or finally the advent of weather that felt like summer, the Wales Millennium Centre was at less than full capacity for the WNO’s performance of Puccini’s Il trittico (1918). Perhaps it was the less than inspiring poster for the production, or maybe a lack…
A Tosca that captures the opera’s thuggish violence, Grange Festival
**** Tosca has always been a dark story of violence and cruelty, that crushes love and hope. The famous ending, here with the jealous singer falling backwards from the battlements of Castel Sant’Angelo with her chilling final words, is one of vengeance and hate not of love. That love has been ripped out of her…
An inventive new L’Incoronazione di Poppea
**** Grange Festival, Hampshire It would seem the contemporary version of achieving the feeling of absolute authority, power over everyone including sexual favours, and endless confidence, is an endless supply of cocaine. For director Walter Sutcliffe, there doesn’t seem to be a version for women – they still seem to need to achieve their status…
A fun-filled Daughter of the Regiment, Donizetti
Grange Park Opera. **** The Daughter of the Regiment is an operatic vehicle for some fine singing and musicianship, and fun. Anything that tries to do any more with it are just missing the point. Fortunately, John Doyle and Nikki Woollaston, co-directors of Grange Park Opera’s staging of Donizetti’s 1840 piece of fun and frolics…
Contemporary sensibilities have to be suspended for Platée, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Garsington Opera
*** Garsington’s updating and reworking of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s comedy dance opera Platée solves the Platée problem; it definitely needs something to lift it from far too cruel and nasty a tale for contemporary audiences. The story revolves around an ugly and deluded swamp nymph, Platée, tricked into thinking the philandering god Jupiter has fallen for…
Peace and Passion, Welsh National Opera, Wales Millennium Centre
★★★ It could not have been more apt for this concert that Mozart was struggling to make ends meet and even hold onto life when composing the Requiem. Our sources tell us he was notorious for a lifestyle of expenditure that income could never keep up with. The work had to be finished by others…
Macbeth, Mid Wales Opera
**** It would be wrong to make what may be the last review of a full-scale work by Mid Wales Opera about the preposterous axing of the company’s funding by the increasingly out of touch Arts Council of Wales. However, the energy on the stage seemed as marked outside of the auditorium at the Riverfront,…
Death in Venice, Britten, Welsh National Opera at Wales Millennium Centre
**** The first instalment in this year’s WNO Spring season was a revisitation of a classic, and so it feels very balanced that we are now invited to explore the dark (and, in places, insalubrious) world of a more esoteric work, one that was produced well after the heyday of classical opera and that is…