Roger Smith was born in London and studied for BA in Music at Kingston University, followed by an MMus in Music Theory and Analysis at Goldsmiths College. He studied opera at Birkbeck College, the City Lit and Morley College.
This is ENO’s third outing for this production of the Philip Glass classic since its debut in 2007 – and no wonder, when it combines an adventurous artistic vision with surefire commercial success in a way that director’s opera so often doesn’t.
There are times a tarnhelm would come in useful. Limited to more conventional means of transport, this reviewer found that it took a ridiculous hour and a half to drive from Soho to Fulham, as a result of which I’m afraid I missed the opening scene of Fulham Opera’s Götterdämmerung.
Director Keith Warner's Royal Opera production of Berg's Wozzeck makes a truly cathartic experience that fully deserved the long ovation it received, with strong performances from Simoin Keenlyside and Karita Mattila.
Small London company Midsummer Opera's production of Verdi's huge Otello was extremely ambitious, with a full orchestra filling St Johns Church, Waterloo. Tenor John Upperton took on a lot, acting as chorusmaster as well as singing Otello, and he took the evening's vocal honours.
If Count Almaviva (to say nothing of Don Giovanni) were alive today, he might perhaps enlist Richard Dawkins to defend his behaviour. We know from evolutionary biology that the male stands the best chance of passing on his genes if he has many partners, the female if she can keep the male around to help raise the children he’s had with her.
Considering the number of operas he set in Britain, Donizetti was surprisingly unfamiliar with the place – Emilia di Liverpool famously has characters, one of whom is the long lost “Count of Liverpool”, stopping off there on their way from London to Oxford.
A note in the programme honestly records the trepidation Opéra de Baugé felt in taking on Verdi’s Aida, a tougher prospect than the other operas with which it’s in rep, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore and Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus.
If Debussy intended Pelléas et Mélisande as a deliberate anti-Tristan, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore perhaps stumbled into the role. Donizetti was of course not responding to Wagner’s opera (which would not be written for another three decades) but to the legend Wagner would also draw on, with results that were rather more... German, shall we say, than the sunlit uplands of L’elisir.
It’s a curious thing that when operatic characters are drinking at a party, they invariably sing about how nice it is to be drinking at a party – never sports results, or the weather, or how all them bleedin’ ’ungarians are coming over to Austria and taking all our jobs...
From Studio to Stage was the name of this year’s summer performance by young artists on the Jette Parker programme at the Royal Opera House. The programme includes not only singers but also conductors/répétiteurs, a pianist, a lighting designer and stage director Pedro Ribeiro, who surely wins the prize for best headshot.
Whatever Puccini’s Madama Butterfly has going for it, it isn’t suspense – everything that’s going to happen is spelled out the first few pages of the score, as Pinkerton chuckles that the marriage contracts in Japan are as flexible as the property leases, renegotiable on a monthly basis, and toasts the day he gets married “for real” to an American bride.
Those who feel that country house opera is in some way not the real thing, just an excuse to dress up and picnic on manicured lawns, should hie to Garsington’s new Die Entführung aus dem Serail with all speed.
Between Baz Luhrmann’s recent film The Great Gatsby, Northern Ballet’s The Great Gatsby currently at Sadler’s Wells, and Elevator Repair Service’s circulation-testing, eight-hour Gatz at the Noël Coward Theatre last year, Londoners such as myself could be forgiven for feeling all Gatsbied out (in truth, Gatz could probably have achieved that by itself).
Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is one of the most beautiful scores in the operatic repertoire, and I don’t blame people who come to it looking forward to immersing themselves in the warm bath of the familiar story and music.
I’m sure before long I’ll see a production of Daisy Pulls It Off that opens with modern day soldiers charging onto the stage waving rifles about – it seems to be the first image directors reach for these days.
The scene in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin where the peasants, weary from gathering in the harvest, sing and dance for the woman who owns the estate (and, for that matter, owns them) is perhaps not the best example of gritty social realism in opera.
