Owen Wingrave at the Edinburgh Festival
Catching Owen Wingrave at the Edinburgh Festival meant that I had now seen all of Britten’s operas. Superbly conducted by Mark Wigglesorth and in an austere but strong production by Neil Bartlett, it was certainly performed with conviction. The singers…
Tannhäuser by the Freiburg Opera
The visit of the Freiburg Theater to Norwich for a Wagner Fest was a welcome addition to the British summer operatic scene. Given the large number of empty seats at the Monday showing of Tannhäuser, it could not have been…
Dvorak’s Jacobin at Buxton
Is Dvorak’s The Jacobin a playful folk opera, or a serious piece about the abuse of power? Probably, both of these and getting the balance right between them cannot be easy. Stephen Unwin with the Buxton Festival Opera made a…
Gasparini’s Bajazet at the Barga Festival
You are in a charming late 18th century theatre in Barga, an attractive hill town of Northern Tuscany. You have thoroughly enjoyed the first two acts of Il Bajazet by Francesco Gasparini, being given its first performance in modern times….
Falstaff in Amsterdam
Can the quality of the orchestral playing can make a difference in the opera house? The question was put to the test during my recent trip to Germany and the Netherlands. At two of my stops world famous orchestras were…
Die Frau ohne Schatten in Leipzig
At last! An opera production in Germany that is visually spectacular and pleasing and dramatically coherent and compelling; although the director responsible for the current version in Leipzig of Die Frau ohne Schatten, Balazs Kovalik, is admittedly Hungarian. He was…
Schahrazade by Bernhard Sekles in Halle
It is gratifying that a number of German opera houses are keen to explore the works of Jewish composers that were banned by the Nazis. Schreker and Korngold being two prominent examples. I confess that the name of Bernhard Sekles…
Der Freischütz in Mannheim
Be wary of any performance in a German theatre publicised as “nach” an author or composer. To be best translated as “based on”, this normally implies that the performers have taken great liberties with the original work. Now the Mannheim…
A Village Romeo and Juliet in Frankfurt
The Frankfurt Opera is one of my favourite venues and I have attended there many impressive performances, but I had not originally intended to see their revival of A Village Romeo and Juliet. Rather my plan was to see Cavalli’s…
Opera North’s Semi-Staged Götterdämmerung
Why, I ask myself, did the Opera North semi-staged performance of Götterdämmerung in the Leeds Town Hall make such an impact? To begin with, we in the audience were much closer to the singers than in a conventional theatre. More…
A starry Faust at Covent Garden
We were going to be in London for the Easter weekend and I had seen the extraordinary cast (Netrebko, Calleja, Terfel, Keenlyside) which the Royal Opera House had announced for the revival of David McVicar’s Faust. So, though I do…
Britten’s Paul Bunyan staged by the ETO
Coming to Britten’s Paul Bunyan for the first time, I was unsure what to expect. A musical? An operetta? A juvenile opera score? What I saw and heard with English Touring Opera’s current production was certainly an agreeable surprise. The…
Cavalli’s Elena in Lille
Lucky Lille, to have the possibility of importing, for three performances, last year’s Aix Festival’s production of Cavalli’s Elena. In apparently its first revival since its creation in 1659, this piece demonstrated again Cavalli’s prowess as a lively reinterpreter of…
WNO’s production of Henze’s Boulevard Solitude
I had been waiting for over thirty years to find a performance of Henze’s Boulevard Solitude and when eventually it turned up, as part of Welsh National Opera’s current season of Fallen Women, I was not disappointed. Far from it….
Bellini’s Straniera in Essen
Bellini’s La Straniera (The Stranger) is indeed strange. Some important aspects of the plot and the motivations of the characters are difficult to understand and confusing. For his production at the Essen Opera, Christof Loy communicated in an interview published…
Cav and Pag at the Deutsche Oper Berlin
To add spice to a revival of David Pountney’s 2005 production of Cavalleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci, the Deutsche Oper Berlin invited two famous Wagnerians, Waltraud Meier and Stephen Gould, to have a few nights off the more serious stuff…
Shiva for Anna at the Berlin Festival for Contemporary Music
Shiva for Anna, given in Berlin as part of the March Festival for Contemporary Music, is a striking piece of musical theatre. The composer Mela Meierhans wanted to pay tribute to her long-standing collaborator, the English poet Anne Blonstein who…
Two Lohengrins at Coburg: Wagner & Sciarrino
The Landestheater Coburg had the bright idea of bringing together in a single weekend Wagner’s Lohengrin and Sciarrino’s modernistic monodrama on the same theme, an exploration of Elsa’s psychological state as she is denied consummation on the wedding night. The…
Brecht/Weill Mahagonny in Hof
The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is undoubtedly a masterpiece of music theatre. Kurt Weill’s musical idiom and Berthold Brecht’s text capture so well the spirit of the Weimar Republic with its mixture of cynicism, pessimism and…
Verdi’s Macbeth in Leeds
Yes, we know that Verdi’s version of Macbeth is, simple, even simplistic, compared with the original. Yet with its directness, vigour and musical inventiveness, it carries a definite punch. The cast which Opera North had assembled for this revival had…