Frank Martin’s Le Vin herbé is as anti-Wagnerian a work as you could imagine. It is also the odd one out in Welsh National Opera’s “Love’s Poisoned Chalice” spring season.
Handel's oratorio Theodora performed by Pinchgut Opera in Sydney was played and sung beautifully in a rather drab production. Kudos to the soloists especially countertenor Christopher Lowery and conductor Erin Helyard.
Mozart's messy monster of an opera gets a brutalist tidy-up at Garsington, but the determinedly straightforward reading only makes this work's innate problems more obvious.
Intelligently staged and brilliantly sung, Scottish Opera can be justly proud of their new production of Ariodante. It is all about the oranges really.
A somewhat overly manic production of Luigi Rossi's version of the Orpheus tale, originally written for the French court in 1647, is lit up by some great singing and a show-stealing comic performance by Graeme Broadbent.
In the opening scene of Pinchgut Opera's latest production, Gluck's rarely performed Iphigénie en Tauride, a swirling musical, dramatic and visually strobe-enhanced tempest is belted out.
Conductor Alan Curtis and musicologist Alessandro Ciccolini have successfully restored Vivaldi's opera Catone in Utica, and they brought it to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris with a star performance from mezzo Ann Hallenberg.
A great number of works from the bel canto era and before have not found their way into the current operatic repertoire, generally for good reason: many are flawed, dated or just not particularly distinguished. Garsington Opera have just proved to us that Rossini’s Maometto Secondo is not one of those.
Handel’s Belshazzar was the oratorio of choice for renowned music group Les Arts Florissants at the Barbican last week. The group was famously set up in France in 1979 by the American-born William Christie, eventually becoming an international household name for its critically acclaimed performances and recordings of Baroque operas on period instruments.
