You may not be in Paris or Berlin but, for Handel’s Semele, you cannot do better than the combination of Emmanuelle Haïm as conductor and Barrie Kosky as stage director. In any event, the Lille production came from the Berlin…
Among Wagner’s music dramas, Tannhäuser has always been popular in France. The revised version of it was, of course, written for Paris, although the explanation for the enthusiasm goes deeper than that and relates to the tradition of grand opéra…
Macbeth is so familiar to British audiences that the piece tends to be over-interpreted, whether in the theatre or the opera house. At the Opera de Marseille, director Frédéric Bélier Garcia resisted such a temptation, focussing on the central…
For their 2022 Leeds Opera Festival, the enterprising Northern Opera Group have moved their principal offering to a splendid new theatre at Leeds Beckett University. This provides comfortable seating for the audience and good acoustics but also a larger performance…
The performances of The Wreckers at Glyndebourne have attracted a great deal of hype, some but not all of which is justified. Let me begin by agreeing that it is a work of substance well worth reviving. Its late-Romantic musical…
The publicity indicated that the performance of Parsifal by Opera North would be semi-staged. Although at other venues the work will apparently be presented more in a concert format, this description does not do justice to what the Leeds audience…
With astute management, imaginative programming and employment of first-rate artists, the Netherlands Opera has in recent years been steadily moving up the Premier League of European opera companies. It has largely avoided the bel canto repertory; so, it was interesting…
Quite an event at the Bonn Oper: the first performance since the 19th century of an early work by Meyerbeer, written to celebrate the reopening of the Berlin opera house following its destruction by fire, but also to honour…
Umberto Giordano will for ever be associated with the popular opera Andrea Chenier but in recent years Fedora has been performed in some of the leading houses, if primarily because the title role offers histrionic opportunities for famous sopranos. Based…
The Marriage of Figaro is such a familiar piece and so well loved that the difficulties of successfully performing Mozart’s masterpiece are often overlooked. For a start, the plot is surprisingly complicated and a clear narrative must be presented. Then,…
Shostakovich’s comic satirical opera The Nose, is a radical piece, cocking a snook at not only Russian communal life and bureaucracy (in Tsarist times) but also traditional operatic form. It was composed at a time when “revolutionary art” was still…
For my sixteenth Don Carlos, performed in Basel, the original French libretto was used. As conductor Michele Spotti observes in the programme, this version has the advantage that it links the work to the tradition of grand opéra français, as…
You arrive in the theatre for the Opera Basel’s performance of one of your favourite operas, Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse, and you read in the programme that Krystian Lada, the director, has decided to dispense with the role of Ulysses. …
LIVE PERFORMANCES All-round performance: L’Italiana in Londra, Frankfurt Conductor: Speranza Scappucini, Eugene Onegin, Liège Stage director: R.B.Schlather, L’Italiana in Londra, Frankfurt Singers: Chrystal E. Williams, Carmen, Opera North Jorge Novarro Colorado, Damon (Acis & Galatea), Buxton Gordon Bintner, Don Polidoro…
For their first full-scale post-pandemic operatic venture, the Royal Northern College of Music offered an intriguing double-bill of the Prologue to Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Menotti’s The Medium. The Strauss was indeed an ambitious undertaking; not so much because…
With the possible exception of Il Matrimonio Segreto, Cimarosa’s operas are not widely known, and that is strange, given their musical qualities and theatrically comic content. As the performance at Frankfurt confirmed, that is particularly the case with L’Italiana in…
You know the works of Puccini. Some of you, perhaps enthusiasts of baroque music, may have heard compositions by Piccinni, but who amongst you has come across Pacini? A Sicilian, he had a reasonably successful career in the mid-19th century,…
My first operatic performance abroad since March 2020! Tchaikovsky’s full-blooded romantic piece Eugene Onegin seemed, after months of deprivation, to be a good choice but what about the venue, Liège’s Opéra Royal de Wallonie which in the past has provided…
Gustav Holst may be well known for The Planets and even the choral piece Hymn of Jesus, but his operas have not been widely performed. Obsessed by Wagner in his early career, he eventually came to acquire a personal voice…
As a composer, Malcolm Arnold did not have an easy time. Although his vast output of works found favour with audiences for their tonal tuneful content, he was treated mainly with disdain by the musical establishment. He had particular misfortune…