Reviews
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…
Opera Favourites, Welsh National Opera
** While Welsh National Opera’s spring concert imaginatively called Opera Favourites did what it said on the tin, it was also partly a musical preview of some scheduled shows. There was, for example, a fair chunk of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, February 2025, and a rousing chorus and orchestral section from Britten’s Peter Grimes,…
Così Fan Tutte, Welsh National Opera
Wales Millennium Centre *** There are some works which are harder to look at under a modern lens than others, and Così Fan Tutte is certainly one of that number. To bring to a stage, in 2024, a work that is literally titled ‘they’re all the same’ is inevitably to contend with its glaring sexism,…
Longborough Festival Opera: the first 30 years
This generously illustrated book will appeal to those who have followed Martin and Lizzie Graham’s obsessive dream turned into reality in creating an opera house in the Cotswolds. But it will also appeal to anyone who enjoys a tale of dogged perseverance in the face of what at times seems the chains of bureaucracy and…
A conservative and beautiful La Traviata, Welsh National Opera, Wales Millennium Centre
What 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…
Sublime theatre and music, Ainadamar, WNO, WMC
***** 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…
Not just any old port in the storm, Les Troyens at the Proms, Albert Hall
**** 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…
The Mikado fun but without much bite, If Opera
This 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…
Intimate and contrasting staging, Double Bill, Waterperry Opera
Waterperry 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…