After nearly two decades away from the Covent Garden stage, it was time Britten's Billy Budd came home, in a new production from Madrid by Deborah Warner.
Simon McBurney's production of The Magic Flute continues to delight and this revival benefits from a strong cast, led by the superb Lucy Crowe as Pamina.
Wagner's storytelling shines brightly with the aid of a cast well out of the ordinary. Vinke, Stemme, Siegel and Lundgren make part 3 of The Ring an unforgettable evening of opera.
Antonio Pappano and the Royal Opera Orchestra get the Ring cycle off to a blazing start; unusually, it's Lise Davidsen and the female cast who take the vocal honours.
Strauss' mix of bedroom farce, comedy of manners and bittersweet musing about aging is acted and sung superbly in this revival of Richard Jones' production.
At the Barbican last night, Gerald Finley, John Adams and the BBC Symphony Orchestra combined to deliver the heaviest operatic punch I’ve been subjected to all year.
Anna Netrebko scored an unmitigated success in her first Manon Lescaut at the Met, almost obliterating director Richard Eyre’s and designer Rob Howell’s misconceived production.
Àlex Ollé and his Fura dels Baus team stage a spectacular looking Norma, the first new production of Bellini's opera at Covent Garden for nearly 30 years.
Weaknesses in the staging did little to dim the musical pleasure of hearing Sir Mark Elder conduct Weber's masterpiece with OAE forces and an impressvee cast
Anyone expecting a wishing well, castle and healthy portion of pomp in Dmitri Tcherniakov’s new production of Pélleas et Mélisande is in for a big surprise.
The Met's new production of Manon Lescaut with Kristine Opolais and Roberto Alagna has great potential to be successful musically, but the production is mixed at best.
Bringing out the unabashed colour and detail of the score, Andrew Davis delivered a superb reading in the pit, tightly coherent and with exemplary attentiveness to articulation.
What makes this Figaro memorable and admirable is the way it manages both to be sprightly in its tone and details and also luxuriant in places that another director might have blown through.
A trip down memory lane sends our man in Aix into raptures as Robert Carsen's production of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream comes home to Provence.
A bearded lady and her taxidermied shark are just two eccentric characters livening up Stravinsky’s 1951 moral fable The Rake’s Progress, though the shark is unique to Jonathan Miller’s revived production.
Employing a new critical edition by Flora Willson, Mark Elder led the forces of The Orchestra of the Age of Englightenment in a concert performance of Donizetti's Les Martyrs, which demonstrates what a tremendous work it is.
A prelude that was pedestrian rather than portentous signalled Maurizio Benini’s approach to Rigoletto: Verdi as aural Ovaltine, tucked up in cosy dressing gown and slippers.
Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius tells the story of a pious man’s death, his travels through Purgatory and finally being accepted into Heaven. It is perhaps not the most dramatic of tales, but one filled with a sense of redemption and intense spirituality.
This BAM production of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd, imported from Glyndebourne, achieves the rare distinction of making a great performance out of a decidedly mediocre work.
Offenbach’s wrongfully neglected masterpiece has returned to us at last, thanks to the concerted efforts of Opera Rara, the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment and Sir Mark Elder; and, above all, because of the tireless, lifelong devotion of one man: Jean-Christophe Keck.
Dancing teddy bears, a larger-than-life Sarastro, live birds and numerous airborn characters all make the brand new production of Mozart’s beloved Singspiel at the Staatsoper a very family-friendly event.
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.
You can view Britten’s Billy Budd as an opera about the failure of words. When the angelic sailor Billy is falsely accused by his superior office Claggart, his stammer prevents him from defending himself and he lashes out, fatally.
Of the various themes that make up Britten’s Gloriana, written to celebrate the coronation in 1953 and being given a rare outing at Covent Garden to mark the work’s 60th anniversary and Britten’s 100th, the most effective by far is a sort of operatic expansion of Shakespeare’s line “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown”.
How, I wonder, is it best for an opera company to treat a revival of a well-aired, well-liked, decent but not particularly radical production of a top ten opera? This was what the Royal Opera had to contend with in this season’s revival of David McVicar’s 2003 setting of Die Zauberflöte: many in the audience will have known every note of the opera, and several will have been thoroughly famili
When going to see a new production at ENO, always expect the unexpected. In ENO’s recent history, that has certainly been true, though not always to its credit. Friday’s opening performance of Charpentier’s Medea was no exception to the rule; however, in this case, it was an opulent, stylish and fabulous (in more than one sense) production, complemented by a truly spectacular cast.
The Kings Place programme booklet for Since it was the Day of Preparation… folds like a thin papery triptych. Yet, the composer’s photograph does not occupy the central panel. Indeed, gushing verbal bombast, a feature all too common in performances of new music, was pleasantly absent.
At one extreme of musical preparation, early music specialists rely on research to ensure authentic performance of music by composers long dead. At the other, composers writing today might well be acquainted with the performers and consult them on the technical possibility of some passages and attend rehearsals.
David McVicar’s production of Berlioz’s opera Les Troyens at the Royal Opera House last month was notable for several reasons. Firstly, stellar vocal performances from world-class lead singers; secondly, brilliant acting; thirdly, ravishing music; and lastly, a memorable set – including a curious giant horse and human made out of what looked like scrap weapons and tools.
Giuseppe Verdi and Arrigo Boito's Otello is renowned as one of the few truly successful Shakespearean operas, and while it's mostly a masterpiece on its own terms rather than Shakespeare's – countless scenes and characters are cut, and the very Verdian drinking song goes on far longer than you'd probably expect – there remains a hint of the brilliance of characterisation with which Shakespeare
