A decent cast was unable to redeem a fundamentally dull opera that lacks the psycholgical complexity and tension of both the original Graham novel and its famous Hitchcock adaptation.
Renée Fleming has decided the time is right to bow out gracefully from the operatic stage, choosing her signature role to bid the fondest of farewells to London.
1960s kitsch set in old Seville, excellent acting and movement direction combines with strong singing and immaculate playing from the OAE to make Glyndeboune's Le nozze di Figaro a triumph.
“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?
“If music be the food of love, play on, give me excess of it.” There was certainly plenty of Shakespeare-inspired music on the bill for the London Philharmonic Orchestra's celebration of The Bard.
Leah Hausman's revival of David McVicar's production allows the comedy to stem from the situations set up by Mozart and da Ponte... aided by Erwin Schrott's witty Figaro.
If “all the world’s a jest”, as Sir John Falstaff claims at the end of Verdi’s final operatic masterpiece, then we need players – and directors – with a sense of frivolity. Robert Carsen truly delivers.
In 1984, I went to Covent Garden to see Andrei Serban's production of Turandot and was bewitched. Thirty years, fifteen revivals and a wealth of opera-going later, I was bewitched all over again by Nicola Luisotti's rendering of the score.
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.
The silence at the end of the concert said it all. To have plunged the attention of the entire Royal Albert Hall into utter silence for a whole minute after the music has finished was an impressive feat. Such was the audience response to Mark Padmore’s closing walk down the back of the stage, as Captain Vere.
In the end, the big man gets the last laugh. Come to think of it, he also gets the first laugh, but for different reasons: you sense that Verdi steadily grew to love Falstaff in the course of writing the opera, as he turns from a coarse buffoon into a maligned old man and, eventually, into the spirit of laughter itself.
In Janáček's opera The Makropulos Case, the operagoer must accept a single premise of implausible fantasy: from then on, the action flows inexorably and logically to its conclusion. It's a device used by a great deal of fantasy literature, from the low-brow of The Day of the Triffids to the high-brow of Janáček's compatriot Kafka's Metamorphosis. In The Makropulos Case, the device is deployed with great theatrical power.
