Regional theatre is having a tough time coping with the effects of cuts in public subsidy and this has led to a paucity of serious drama. Let me give the example of Yorkshire and its principal playhouses – I ignore…
David Harrower’s play Blackbird won the Laurence Olivier award for the best new play of 2005. I could make a cheap pun on the appropriateness of the playwright’s name because the two-hander piece about sexual abuse is powerful and at…
Il Turco in Italia is one of my favourite Rossini operas. In addition to the brilliant score, there is the Pirandellian device of having a poet commenting on the characters and interacting with them, to see if he can influence…
A delightful “duettino” of one-act operas at Venice’s Teatro Malibran. The composer of the first of these, Roberto Hazon, was unfamiliar to me. Born in 1930, he wrote in an easy, tonal melodic style, sharpened up with occasional dissonances, glissandi…
I can understand why it was thought a good idea to stage Handel’s early oratorio Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno. An allegory of how beauty and concomitant pleasure are transient and superficial makes for good theatre. Moreover the…
Sometimes when you are away from the familiar operatic circuit you strike gold. Who would have expected to find extravagant music theatre in Moravia-Silesia? But extravagant it was. A rare revival of Bohislav Martinů’s “opera-film” The Three Wishes, better known…
It is always a pleasure to return to Die Dreigroschenoper. I love Weill’s music. I relish Brecht’s text, particularly when as here in Vienna it is given in the original because the sound of German in this work is as…
Smetana’s opera The Devil’s Wall is rarely performed outside its homeland and it is not difficult to understand why. It tells the story of a devil who seeks to thwart a feudal lord in leading a life of love and…
DIRECTORS Lydia Steier: Giulio Cesare in Egitto, Berlin Komische Oper Fabio Ceresa: I Puritani, Turin DESIGNERS Tiziano Santi: I Puritani, Turin Friedrich Eggert/Alfred Mayerhofer: Fantasio, Karlsruhe CONDUCTORS Michael Schønwandt: Saul og David, Copenhagen Riccardo Frizza: Norma, Paris Théâtre…
The name Henri Sauguet is less familiar today than it was when I was first listening to French contemporary music in the late 60s and early 70s. And there are good reasons why his opera Les Caprices de Marianne, first…
Many people go to bel canto opera for what its name indicates, beautiful singing. Yet, without dramatic impulse, even the most accomplished and virtuoso vocalisation can leave one dissatisfied. The large audience attending the new production of Norma at the…
Heinrich Marschner’s opera Hans Heiling, like the better known Der Freschütz from the same period, has the typical German romantic obsession with the other world and its impact on human nature. In this case, Heiling, the prince of the earth…
Boris Blacher was a prominent German composer in the period immediately following the Second World War but his works appear now largely to be ignored. So the Leipzig Opera showed enterprise in mounting the short chamber opera Die Nachtschwalbe. It…
At the Dresden Semperoper you expect to encounter good performances of the operas of Richard Strauss, not the least Elektra which received its premiere here in 1909. And when the cast boasts Iréne Theorin in the title role, Camilla Nylund…
Libuše is a strange piece. A myth set in pre-Christian times, it purports to locate the origins of the Czech nation in ideals of reconciliation and love of nature. The music is Smetana in his stirringly patriotic, rather than lyrical,…
I am not often moved to write about dance, but the recent programme given by the Dutch National Ballet was so extraordinarily satisfying that my feelings about it have to be communicated. It has to be said at once that…
Bohuslav Martinů was a prolific and eclectic composer. There is a vast gulf between the fun-loving works dating from his association with Les Six in Paris and those later in his career, serious and intense in character. The Greek Passion…
There are two types of opera production which irritate me enormously. One is when the creative team wants at any cost to provoke the audience with an interpretation which is perverse, vulgar or silly. The second, at the other extreme…
Prior to the current production at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, the only previous time I had seen Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie was in 1966, when I was twenty-one. Notwithstanding an outstanding cast which included Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Ian McShane…
Theatre is a wonderful thing. During a three-week holiday in Canada you are in Newfoundland at a remote outport (local term for an isolated coastal settlement where people grow up with strong cultural traditions), and you come across there a…