Amanda Majeski is magnificent in the title role; Ed Gardner shows total master of Janáček's music. But that's not enough to rescue a poorly thought out Richard Jones production.
Designer/director Antony McDonald treads a perfectly weighted path between light and dark of the fairytale; conductor Sebastian Weigle cooks up a Wagnerian storm; Michaela Schuster steals the show. A treat.
Oper Frankfurt's revival of Richard Jones's production of Billy Budd with a homegrown cast is a devastating combination of powerful music and searing drama.
Top accolades go to soprano Mary Plazas, whose Duchess was at once despicable for her sense of entitlement and her racist and anti-Semitic views, and heartbreakingly vulnerable with her realisation at the end that "the only people who were ever good to me were paid for it".
At La Scala, Milan a disappointing tribute to Giorgio Strehler's historic staging of The Marriage of Figaro by young English director Frederic Wake-Walker.
La finta giardiniera isn't one of Mozart's greatest operas. But this is about as good a production of it as I can imagine and makes for a deliciously light-hearted evening.
Welsh National Opera’s contribution to the Wagner bicentenary is in the form of a summer season entitled Wagner Dream, consisting of Jonathan Harvey’s opera of the same name, a run of Madam Butterfly, and Antony McDonald’s new production of Lohengrin. Lothar Koenigs conducted an excellent performance of Wagner’s romantic opera at a packed Wales Millennium Centre.
For a Parisian, the accordion is the musical instrument most redolent of memories and dreams. So for Bohuslav Martinů's surrealist opera Julietta, written in Paris and infused with a discombobulating jumble of memories and dreams, Antony McDonald's sets were masterpieces: in each of three acts, the stage is dominated by a giant accordion which is more or less the size of the whole stage.
The eponymous heroine of Dvořák’s Rusalka is a water-sprite from the woods and lakes of Middle European fairy-tale, very much the territory familiar to ballet lovers in Giselle and Swan Lake.
