A recital at this year’s Buxton Festival, given by soprano Sarah-Jane Lewis and baritone Gareth Brynmor John with pianist Simon Lepper, offered an interesting combination of duets and songs by Brahms, Mendelssohn, Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky. However, an audience cannot appreciate…
The Erl Festival in the Inn valley among the Tyrolean foothills is now in its 18th year but the current performances of Tristan und Isolde constitute the first Wagner to be heard in the new Festspielhaus; others have taken place…
Poliuto at Glyndebourne, the 20th Donizetti opera I have seen – only 55 to go! It is based on Corneille’s play Polyeucte which was a set text for my French A Level. The librettto swings, sometimes, awkwardly between love and…
Opera North has had great success with its semi-staged instalments of the Ring – to be performed in its entirety next season – and it was understandable that they should wish to explore other Wagnerian works with the same approach….
Baldassare Galuppi, who was a successor to Handel as director of the Italian Opera at London’s Haymarket Theatre, wrote over 70 works for the stage, very few of which have seen the light of day since. But Alessandro nell’Indie, given…
The performance of Verdi’s Luisa Miller at the Stuttgart Oper was a revival of a production mounted in 2010 and it revealed again the power of this work, with its intense musical content and compact dramatic structure. The conductor Marco…
Die Königin von Saba is a German romantic grand opera first performed in 1875. Immensely popular in its day, with its combination of an exotic setting, religion and sex, and big choral scenes, it is now largely forgotten. As regards…
Offenbach wrote over a hundred works for the stage and understandably many of them have not been deemed worthy of a revival in modern times. Fantasio is not often performed and, on the basis of the current production at Karlsruhe,…
The first night of Giulio Cesare at the Komische Oper, resulted, unusually but deservedly, in resounding cheers for the production team of director Lydia Steier and designers Katharina Schlipf and Ursula Kudrna. The focus of their staging was Cleopatra as…
Werner Egk’s operatic version of Peer Gynt is, as demonstrated by the recent performance at the Braunschweig Staatstheater, a highly effective work. Eclectic musically, with affinities to Kurt Weill, Richard Strauss and Paul Hindemith, it is easy on the ear…
The performance of The Rake’s Progress by the Berlin Staatsoper at the Schiller Theater was musically one of the best I can recall. Domingo Hindoyan in the pit emphasised the lyrical and dramatic dimensions of the score rather than the…
I have been waiting thirty years for a performance of Carl Nielsen’s Saul and David. My only previous experience of the work had been an inauthentic recording in English with Boris Christoff, Elizabeth Söderström and Alexander Young which did not…
Luca Francesconi’s Quartett first performed at La Scala in 2011 and subsequently given at ROH’s Linbury Studio and elsewhere has recently had a most successful Nordic première in Malmö Based on Heiner Müller’s play, a reflection on Les Liaisons Dangereuses…
The long-standing presence of Russians in Monte Carlo going back to Diaghilev and beyond might help to explain the choice of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk for a gala performance at the famous opera house based in the Casino, although…
An English opera in Italy? What next: Eccles cake in the pasticceria? But if you are going to perform Billy Budd in Italy, there could be nowhere better than Genoa. In the first act, the sailors sing lustily “we’re off…
In Italy you might encounter simple productions, eccentric productions, daring productions … but they will generally be good to look at. So it was with I Puritani at the Teatro Regio in Turin. The opera has fine music, some impressive…
Tippett’s The Ice Break is more often written about than performed and it is not difficult to understand why. Though the music has energy and, being predominantly lyrical, falls gratefully on the ear, the plot is chaotic and the libretto…
Of all subjects to write a play about, life in Auschwitz must be the most difficult. Arthur Miller’s Playing for Time, originally written for television in 1980, has been bravely revived at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre. Sian Phillips as Fania Fenelon,…
Fortunately, it happens sometimes. You have a ticket for an opera about a poor country girl who, removed to Paris, is set up in a luxury apartment by her aristocratic lover. She loses her reason when she is falsely accused…
At the end of a talk which I gave last year on the evolution of staging operas, I was asked by a member of the audience whether I had seen a traditional production of Carmen in recent years. The answer…