The Linbury re-opens its doors to opera with a new work whose libretto is superbly crafted by Francesca Simon, featuring a tour de force performance by Marta Fontanals-Simmons as the Norse goddess Hel.
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.
Annie Proulx's love story between two men in rural Wyoming sees its opera première. Strong casting and an irregular score turn Spain into the capital of the opera.
This autumn is Strauss and Freud season in London: while the Royal Opera are showing Charles Edwards’s searingly Freudian take on Richard Strauss’s Elektra, ENO have opted for the polar opposite mood with Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus: Christopher Alden’s production is just as Viennese, just as laden with dreams and sexuality, but filled to the brim with gags and frivolous decadence.
Military service brutalises. If you’re in any doubt about this, Berg’s short opera Wozzeck should dispel them, and particularly so in Carrie Cracknell’s new production for ENO.
Pairing Mendelssohn’s Fifth Symphony, the so-called “Reformation Symphony”, and Bruckner’s Third Mass in F minor seemed to me at first a rather novel, but very interesting idea. It was perhaps not the most daring of programmes, but certainly a very interesting one, picking a symphony steeped in Protestant tradition and then a Catholic mass.
When choosing a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta to be performed at the Proms in a year firmly branded as "London 2012", The Yeomen of the Guard had obvious appeal, being set in one of the capital's most famous landmarks, and giving the opportunity, even in semi-staged form, to deck the hall with Beefeater uniforms.
ENO's latest première matches a young theatre director with a reputation for cutting-edge drama to one of the earliest operas in the repertoire, in the less-than-conventionally-operatic surroundings of London's Young Vic. It's an improbable combination, and I wasn't at all sure what to expect.
La magnífica producción de Elektra creada por Patrice Cheréau llega al Liceu bajo la dirección musical de Josep Pons, que al frente de la orquesta del teatro y junto a las voces de Herlitzius, Pieczonka y Meier recrean con gran éxito una de las parituras más bellas del s. XX.
