West Side Story’s flick-knife-to-the-guts thrill never landed its final blow
It was as though Damien Hirst had confessed a secret passion for Victorian watercolours, or Lars von Trier had admitted…
Deft, elegant and genuinely chilling: Garsington’s Turn of the Screw reviewed
Think of the children in opera. Not knowing sopranos and mezzos, pigtailed and pinafored or tightly trousered-up to look child-like,…
Testosterone and passion: Royal Opera’s Marriage of Figaro reviewed
Another turn around the block for David McVicar’s handsome 1830s Figaro at the Royal Opera — the sixth since the…
Saved by the chorus
We’ve cried wolf with Handel. Ever since the modern trend began for staging the composer’s oratorios we’ve hailed each one…
Where was the sex? Opera Holland Park’s Manon Lescaut reviewed
Where was the desire, the frisson, the flicker of attraction? Hell, where was the sex? I ask because a week…
The Holy Grail of concert-going: I Fagiolini deliver serious musicianship that never takes itself too seriously
We’ve all read the article. It does the rounds with the dispiriting regularity of an unwanted dish on a sushi…
An abdication of interpretative responsibility: Royal Opera’s Billy Budd reviewed
The climactic central scene of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd ends unexpectedly. The naval court has reached a verdict of death,…
ENO’s Jack the Ripper needs to decide if it wants to be a gore-fest or social history
Is it possible to write a feminist opera about Jack the Ripper? Composer Iain Bell thinks it is, and his…
Deft humour and daft imagery: WNO’s Magic Flute reviewed
Operas are like buses. Both are filled with pensioners and take ages to get anywhere, but more importantly they always…
Never quite pivots from thesis to drama: Royal Opera’s Queen of Spades reviewed
We increasingly accept the collision between life and art. Whether we’re puzzling over the real identity of Elena Ferrante, choosing…
Divulging the secret of the famous ‘King’s sound’?
Earlier this year The Spectator published an article in celebration of Evensong — the nightly sung service of the Anglican…
![Gaelle Arquez as Carmen in Barrie Kosky's production at the Royal Opera. [Photo: ROH / Bill Cooper]](https://spectatorau.imgix.net/content/uploads/2018/12/Opera.jpg?auto=compress,enhance,format&crop=faces,entropy,edges&fit=crop&w=410&h=275)
Kosky’s Carmen is still the smartest show in town – and the most fun
It’s December, and while musical theatre is busy celebrating ‘warm woollen mittens’, opera, as usual, is far more interested in…
Real psychological horror and a mesmerising heroine: ENO’s Lucia di Lammermoor reviewed
How do you solve a problem like Lucia? Murder, madness, abuse, possibly even incest, all set to a soundtrack of…
In praise of the English Touring Opera — a minor miracle of the arts world
Wolverhampton; Workington; Blackburn; Sheffield; Lancaster; Hackney. Every year English Touring Opera does what our national opera company doesn’t: packs up…
![A woman-child of dangerous assurance: Allison Cook as Salome in Adena Jacobs’s new production for English National Opera. [Catherine Ashmore]](https://spectatorau.imgix.net/content/uploads/2018/10/6Octopera.jpg?auto=compress,enhance,format&crop=faces,entropy,edges&fit=crop&w=410&h=275)
A fascinating failure, but a failure nonetheless: ENO’s Salome reviewed
Yes, Oscar Wilde never wrote it. No, Strauss didn’t intend it. In fact, the composer famously demanded the Dance of…
Opera North’s Tosca will leave you quivering
At the end of Act Two of Tosca there are some 30 bars of orchestral music — accompaniment to a…
Often baffling but ultimately entertaining: Britten’s Paul Bunyan reviewed
‘I feel I have learned lots about what not to write for the theatre…’ There’s a prevailing idea that the…
Currentzis’s Beethoven asked us to listen with our bodies rather than our minds
Some conductors conduct from the fingers — think of Gergiev’s convulsive gestures, flickering up and down the keyboard of an…
What a wasted opportunity: Jonas Kaufmann’s Four Last Songs reviewed
No wonder we have a problem with classical music in this country. The week started in celebration. The stats are…
A delicious operatic ragout of horror: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk reviewed
There is famously no door into the late-night diner of Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’. Its three silent patrons are trapped behind…
What’s in a name
Janacek is the master of the operatic title. Think of the slippery, sleight-of-hand emphasis of Jenufa in its original Czech…
Yet another dud Un ballo in maschera: Opera North’s new production reviewed
A chaste act of adultery and a silent conversation: these are the encounters at the heart of Un ballo in…
Nick Coleman hears better with half an ear than the rest of us do with two
If you’ve ever had a text or email thread spiral wildly and unexpectedly out of control or clocked a couple…
Partying like it’s 1899: two lieder recitals reviewed
If a symphony is, as Mahler famously put it, ‘like the world’, then songs and lieder are like seeing that…
Salon Strauss
An opera without singers, a Strauss orchestra of just 16, and an early music ensemble playing Mahler: welcome to the…
