Ed Lyon
Il ritorno d’Ulisse, Garsington Opera at Wormsley
★★★★★ Il ritorno d’Ulisse is probably the hardest of Monteverdi’s surviving works to bring off on a contemporary stage. First heard during Venice’s 1639–40 carnival season, Ulisse is now called part of a trilogy of Monteverdi works, although that is only a modern term for what has survived. Ulisse, and Orefo which has already been…
WNO Successfully Stages the Unstageable Candide
Wales Millennium Centre Leonard Bernstein’s Candide premiered on Broadway in 1956 where its short-run was met with puzzlement and poor reviews. While Candide has found more favourable reactions in recent decades, it remains a problematic work. What exactly is it? An opera? A musical? Welsh National Opera opts to call it an operetta – which…
Gorgeously sung, clean and stylised Rodelinda
Garsington Opera **** This is a superbly sung Handel, the drama full of fire, with the complicated baroque story given a clean and stylised theatrical telling. Rodelinda may be a tangled tapestry of dynastic plots, romantic fidelity, and moral reckonings, but at Garsington this summer, the ensemble of exquisite voices cut through the intrigue with…
A delightful, enlightening Candide, Welsh National Opera
**** It has been a while since I can remember Welsh National Opera getting a (well-deserved) standing ovation and while it is a pity it is for a fun musical rather than “serious opera” at least the company is pleasing people again. Similarly, the previous crowd-pleaser was Blaze of Glory, another witty and laugh-out-loud lighter…
An Arcadian idyll: Orfeo at Garsington Opera
One of the many delights of Garsington Opera is how the glass walls of the pavilion allow for the “action” to begin and continue beyond the actual stage and auditorium. Being set in the exquisite Wormsley Estate, itself an Arcadian idyll, this is wonderfully appropriate for the first act of John Caird’s charming production of…