Opera
Get me to an opera house
In anyone’s hands, Verdi’s Aida is not the easiest opera to raise up to greatness on the stage. How does…
Get me to an opera house
In anyone’s hands, Verdi’s Aida is not the easiest opera to raise up to greatness on the stage. How does…
The Magic Flute has never made more cartoonish sense - an Edinburgh Festival roundup
London may cry foul over Hamlet’s misplaced to-be-ing and not-to-be-ing but Edinburgh is in raptures over a Magic Flute which…
As with so many Strauss operas, Daphne's one redeeming feature is its end
Richard Strauss’s Daphne is one of the operas he wrote during the excruciatingly long Indian summer of his composing life,…
Opera in Edinburgh: even the best Stravinsky can’t beat mediocre Mozart
Is Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress anything more than an exercise in style? ‘I will lace each aria into a tight…
Glyndebourne’s Ravel double bill comes close to perfection
When I saw the first performance of this production of Ravel’s two operas at Glyndebourne three years ago, I thought…
Startling and sublime - even the candles got a round of applause: Glyndebourne’s Saul reviewed
Caius Gabriel Cibber’s statues of ‘Melancholy’ and ‘Raving Madness’, their eyes staring blindly into the void, petrified in torment, once…
Don’t listen to Amadeus - this Salieri opera is better than Mozart
Magical transformations are a commonplace of opera. We see our heroes turned into animals, trees, statues; witness wild beasts turned…
Delibes’ Lakmé at Holland Park is visually soporific, but the singing keeps Geoff Brown awake
These are nervous times at the opera. When should we expect the gratuitous rape scene? Will the director relocate the…
When is a rape not a rape? Fiona Shaw's Rape of Lucretia at Glyndebourne reviewed
When is a rape not a rape? It’s an unsettling question — far more so than anything offered up by…
The gang rape was the least offensive thing about Royal Opera's new William Tell
There’s no such thing as a tasteful rape scene — or there certainly shouldn’t be. It’s an act of grossest…
The finest Tristan since Siegfried Jerusalem
Which of Wagner’s mature dramas is the most challenging, for performers and spectators? The one you’re seeing at the moment,…
Hans Werner Henze: the Ed Miliband of opera
We opera critics love gazing into crystal balls. We’re particularly good at discovering Ed Milibands and backing them to the…
ENO’s Queen of Spades: I wanted to grab David Alden’s production by the neck and shake out its silly clutter
The opera director David Alden has never been one to tread the straight and narrow. Something kinky would emerge, I’m…
Was Glyndebourne right to revive Donizetti's Poliuto? No, says Michael Tanner
It’s been a busy operatic week, with a nearly great concert performance of Parsifal in Birmingham on Sunday (reviewed by…
Half-brilliant, half-bewildering: Peter Pan at Welsh National Opera reviewed
In Beryl Bainbridge’s novel An Awfully Big Adventure the producer Meredith Potter issues a doughty injunction on the subject of…
Do you see me laughing? Mike Leigh’s Pirates of Penzance at the ENO reviewed
Forget the pollsters and political pundits — English National Opera called it first and called it Right when it programmed…
‘Bewitching’: Krol Roger at the Royal Opera reviewed
‘What gives your lies such power?’ asks the bewildered Sicilian leader in Szymanowski’s opera Krol Roger. The question is addressed…
OperaUpClose’s production of Elixir of Love is by far the best update of an opera Michael Tanner has ever seen
Three staples of the Italian repertoire, performed and seen in very different circumstances, have confirmed my view that they deserve…
Il turco in Italia, Royal Opera House, reviewed: bring sunglasses
Big slats of orange, burning yellows, an Adriatic in electric blue: I wish I’d bought my sunglasses to the Royal…
ENO's Between Worlds at the Barbican reviewed: too respectful
This week, some 200 years since Goya’s ‘The Disasters of War’, almost 80 years after Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, and over 50…
Tippett’s triumphant failure: Birmingham Opera Company’s The Ice Break reviewed
The Ice Break is Michael Tippett’s fourth opera, first produced at Covent Garden in 1977 and rarely produced anywhere since,…
Why we should revel in the empty virtuosity of Handel's pasticcios
Before the jukebox musical, back when Mamma Mia!, Jersey Boys and Viva Forever! were still dollar-shaped glints in an as-yet-unborn…
Royal Opera's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny review: far too well behaved
Brecht/Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny was premièred in 1930, Auden/Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in 1951. Twenty-one…
Alice in Wonderland at the Barbican reviewed: too much miaowing
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson loved little girls. He loved to tell them stories, he loved to feed them jam, he loved…
