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.
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.
Scottish Opera's Il trovatore has a uniformly strong cast and shorus who sing finely, conducted by Tobias Ringwood producing spectacular sounds from the orchestra. A wonderful end to the season.
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.
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.
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.
For many people, to repeat a commonplace, opera is about those "wow" moments, the times when music, voice and staging come together to lift you onto a different plane. In ENO's Tosca last night, a "wow" moment happened more or less whenever Gwyn Hughes Jones opened his mouth: his Cavaradossi had total heroism, total artistry and effortless, silk-smooth phrasing.
The ENO's production of Donizetti's "melodrama in a prologue and two acts" Lucrezia Borgia is notable for two reasons. Firstly, it's a new production of an opera by a major bel canto composer, but one that isn't performed all that often. Secondly, it's the operatic debut of acclaimed film director Mike Figgis.
Back in the 1950s and 60s, Vincenzo Bellini's Norma was one of the standards of the repertoire, putting in regular appearances at the world's top opera houses. It was a staple role for Maria Callas, who performed the opera 89 times.
