The Royal College of Music's first opera of the season, The Cunning Little Vixen has some excellent singing and first-class playing from the student orchestra.
It may not be perfect, but this rare chance to see Rossini's La gazzetta should not be missed, in a glitteringly elaborate production with a talented young cast, great choreography and even a pantomime camel...
Five short, exciting new works created in response to images by William Hogarth, showcasing a plethora of upcoming talent which already has lots to say about love, life, unkind critics and rave culture.
Imeneo (1740), Handel’s penultimate opera, is atypical on several fronts. It’s relatively short by Handel’s standards (three acts, under two hours of music); the plot is thin, but not as absurd or complicated as those of some of his other operas (there are no disguises, for example); the title role is composed for a bass; and the opera has a chorus which participates in the plot, rather than
“I apologise to those who anticipated togas, or 17th-century Venice”, writes James Conway in the programme notes to his production of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea, currently running at the Royal College of Music’s Britten Theatre in London.
Riccardo Primo, Re d’Inghilterra (or in English, Richard I), is Handel’s only opera based on the story of an English monarch, and it was premiered in the coronation year of King George II in 1727 (although in fact it was composed the year before but postponed).
When one sets off to the opera to attend what is usually called a ‘double bill’, one will, most of the time, expect to see two operas clearly contrasting in character. More unusual is to find two extremely different works, hardly sharing anything between themselves, presented in a reading that digs deep for any possible echoes.
If anyone tells you that all opera is highbrow, Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld provides you with a perfect example of the opposite. It's coarse, raunchy, fast, fun, and continually pokes fun at the conventions of grand opera.
