Opera Holland Park updates Puccini's setting to the 1960s in a production that does not completely work, but benefits from the strong performance of Elizabeth Llewellyn as its leading lady.
Scottish Opera’s production of Philip Glass and Christopher Hampton's The Trial says less about Kafka’s vision of an absurd world and more about the absurdity of contemporary operatic conventions.
Can classic opera reflect the political status of the society in which it is performed? Calixto Bieito's production of Turandot for Northern Ireland Opera raises some uncomfortable questions.
The Warsaw Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra offered a program of Szymanowski’s Stabat Mater and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Their performance at Cadogan Hall had outstanding moments but overall felt unremarkable.
Is it possible for us to feel a shred of sympathy for Lulu, surely one of opera’s most notorious anti-heroines, even when she meets her grizzly demise at the coda of Berg’s eponymous masterwork? I think it speaks volumes about the astonishing quality of soprano Marie Arnet’s performance that my answer to this question after seeing Welsh National Opera’s new production of Lulu is a most def
Scottish Opera’s final production of the season was a revival of the much-loved 1980 production of Tosca by the late Anthony Besch, redirected here by Jonathan Cocker. Besch was struck by the political parallel between the Napoleonic era of the 1800s and Italy under Mussolini in the 1940s, and he made the bold choice to set this production in 1943.
It has become customary to give recent productions of Hänsel and Gretel a modern and often murkier twist, perhaps mirroring the current surge in popularity of darker stories, and the appetite for Nordic noir in particular.
Those of us who are regulars at the Royal Albert Hall know how difficult it can be for an orchestra and choir to really fill that enormous space with sound.
