A joyous explosion of tuneful Victorian satire provides an unlikely, yet ideal, contrast to English Touring Opera's Tosca as their Patience tours the UK in this finely-cast, period-perfect production.
ETO's charactistically clear, simple production conveys Homer's story with clarity, confidence, and charm – and even humour – from a fine cast, making an exciting start to fully-staged opera at Saffron Hall.
Updating 470BC Abydos to a 1940s RAF base complete with tin hangar and outdoor privy seemed at times more Dad’s Army than a particularly cohesive tale of war and love.
“Honour your masters!” Sachs instructs Walther in the final scene. Wagner's spirit was honoured well as Glyndebourne's festival opened, but did the song contest necessarily crown the right winner?
Few composers deal in genial wit better than Joseph Haydn, so it was baffling that his opera buffa Il mondo della luna left me so grumpy in this English Touring Opera production.
English Touring Opera's production of Mozart's The Magic Flute launches in Hackney, balanced more towards fun than profundity, with some stunning coups de théâtre.
Agrippina was a force to be reckoned with: the granddaughter, sister, niece, wife and mother of four Roman Emperors (and lover, incestuously, of at least two). As Mary Beard points out in her brilliant programme introduction, “Agrippina was probably the best connected woman that the Roman world ever saw” – and one of the most ruthless.
“... and as Venice in many things surpasses all places else where I have been, so are these Operas the most excellent of all its glorious Vanities.” So wrote the entranced English traveller Richard Bargrave in 1655. These days, however, Venice travels to England in the form of the English Touring Opera’s 2013 autumn season production.
This week the Linbury Studio Theatre attracted an audience of the more minute variety with its dazzling production of The Firework-Maker’s Daughter. Based on Philip Pullman’s novel, the two-act opera transported its listeners into the realms of the Far East with papery costumes, Indonesian shadow puppetry and hand-crafted pyrotechnics.
The Barber of Seville and Eugene Onegin, the two operas being toured by English Touring Opera this season, share two things: they are both highly melodic stalwarts of the repertoire, and their plots both revolve around the writing of love letters.
