Olena Tokar's assured coloratura made an immediate success of the waltz with her convincingly adolescent appearance, rhythmic verve and stylish phrasing.
Grange Park Opera’s enjoyable new production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera looks a little homespun on stage, but has plenty of musical compensations.
Grange Park Opera scored a direct hit with a fine production of Janáček's masterpiece, led by a superb performances from Natalya Romaniw and Susan Bullock as Jenůfa and the Kostelnička.
Strong vocal and orchestral performances and a tour-de-force staging of Act II light up Grange Park's production of Verdi's political thriller of the dark days of the Spanish inquisition.
Using Stephen Medcalf’s 2008 staging, this opening night of love and loneliness was a feast for the eyes, a musical triumph and a dramatic tour-de-force that tugged at the heart strings.
Dancing, jokes, a pogrom and Bryn Terfel balancing on milk vats. It could only be Fiddler on the Roof. Grange Park Opera took an eclectic combination and planted if successfully on the Proms stage.
Stephen Medcalf's meticulous staging of Tchaikovsky's bitter masterpiece is lit up by Jung Soo Yun's Lensky, giving a direct injection of emotions: verismo before its time.
Grange Park’s Samson et Dalila doesn’t hit the bull’s eye, but it’s well worth the visit for a decent all-round staging of an unfamiliar work, an excellent rendering of its sumptuous score and for a thrilling piece of singing by Carl Tanner.
Stylish, intelligent and visceral, with a magnetic central performance by Claire Rutter, Grange Park give us a powerful, tough La traviata updated to 1950s Hollywood.
Bringing Peter Grimes to Grange Park a year after the Britten centenary is an enormous challenge. With ‘Grimes on the Beach’ still fresh in the memory, the task of recreating the Suffolk coast in Hampshire’s idyllic countryside might have seemed a step too far.
When you think chic, black-tie country house opera, you probably don’t also think sixteen barefoot nuns being executed. Grange Park Opera’s fusion of these two contrasting ideas, however, has a lot going for it: their production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites combines its minimal but effective staging with some impressive singing.
With programming in the major opera houses dominated by Verdi and Wagner, bel canto fans have had a slightly thin time of it this year (Covent Garden’s La donna del lago is an exception). But others are filling some of the gaps, with Rossini’s Maometto II coming up at Garsington and Stephen Langridge’s production of Bellini’s I Puritani, which opened at Grange Park last night.
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.
If your favourite part of opera is a soaring melody which stays in your head long after the opera is over, they don’t come much better than Un bel dì in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, in which our enraptured heroine sings of the day that her husband’s ship will reappear on the horizon. At Grange Park last night, Claire Rutter did it full justice.
History has cast a complex light on Wagner’s music and on Wagner the man. But Tristan & Isolde (Wagner’s enormous vision of erotic love) is an opera that can still resonate today. Nietzsche referred to its “dangerous fascinations”, “spine-tingling and blissful infinity“ and “voluptuousness”. This was Grange Park Opera’s first foray into Wagnerian opera.
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.
