Il ritorno d’Ulisse, Garsington Opera at Wormsley
20th June 2026
Don Carlo, Grange Park Opera
15th June 2026
**** Handel’s Semele was an excellent choice for the always surpring Waterperry Opera Festival. The exquisite Waterperry Garden’s offered Handel’s drama an environment in which music, myth, and landscape coalesced to stirring effect. The open air lent freshness to the score, while the transition from daylight to dusk mirrored the opera’s descent from playful seduction…
**** In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the tyrant reflects on his wife’s death with the immortal words: “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It is tempting to dismiss Verdi’s Macbeth as staged by Krzysztof Warlikowski at the Salzburg Festival, with Shakespeare’s famous line about “sound and fury, signifying nothing”. It was a powerful evening of theatre yet there…
**** We were advised Cecilia Bartoli was suffering from a cold but would perform. Phew! Cold aside, the soprano gave an exquisite performance in Barrie Kosky’s three-hour pasticcio, Hotel Metamorphosis. Her performance was central to the success of this show that braids Vivaldi’s arias and music with famous selections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The scenes enabled…
IF Opera – Rigoletto & Orpheus in the Underworld, Church Farm, 2025 IF Opera’s move from the stately lawns of Belcombe Court to the working idyll of Church Farm has brought with it a pleasing blend of rustic charm and artistic ambition – plus the novelty of rescue donkeys grazing contentedly in the neighbouring field…
*** Some productions jolt you like a live cable. Unfortunately, the thematic current running through Yuval Sharon’s Lohengrin at Bayreuth wasn’t the thrilling charge of Wagner’s drama—it was the sort of shock that a concept can be so overdone, leaving your battery flat. Elza van den Heever , Piotr Beczała Staged in 2018 but revived…
***** Wagner is not often associated with levity, but Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg remains his great comic outlier: a sprawling, richly textured celebration of art, tradition, and renewal. That didn’t stop director Matthias Davids from turning it into something resembling an agricultural show —complete with hay bales, Merkel look-alikes, and, in Act III, a giant…
“Never do anything for the first time.” So the old saying goes in the opera business. This deliberate paradox contains a hard truth: making any sort of debut is a challenge. And in particular, performing a major operatic role for the first time is fraught with unforeseen dangers. So, for any young singer contemplating making…
*** From the moment the audience entered the auditorium for the company’s Emerging Artists production this was clearly going to be a fun evening, even if the story is, of course, one of great tragedy. Musicians from the early music ensemble Barokksolistene walked up and down the side aisles, playing their instruments, and chatting with…
**** The double bill of one act operas is given a linked theme of fallen women through a clever inclusion of the nun as young girl and her lover making a making a brief appearance in Cavalleria rusticana, presumably before her convent days in Suor Angelica. Paul Carr’s direction also has nuns in the Sicilian…
**** Dorset Opera performing at the Coade Theatre at Bryanston School is more than an offering of good quality musical theatre. It is a showcase of some very strong professional singers and for the young people who have taken part in the summer school at the Blandford Forum. The combination is exhilarating. For this production…
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