Royal opera house

Artists of the Royal Ballet against the easel-worthy backcloths of John Macfarlane’s ravishing designs for Swan Lake

Proper tutus, gorgeous designs, first-rate dancing: Royal Ballet’s new Swan Lake reviewed

26 May 2018 9:00 am

The Royal Ballet’s 2016 Frankenstein was a masterclass in how not to make narrative dance and the news that Liam…

The glums: Marisol Montiel and Ana Luisa Montiel in Taryn Simon’s ‘An Occupation of Loss’

Grief-conjurors, space-mincers and earth-shovellers: performance roundup

19 May 2018 9:00 am

They enter two by two. Grannies, mainly. Headscarved, mainly. Some locking arms. A bit glum. Like rejects from Noah’s ark.…

A delicious operatic ragout of horror: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk reviewed

21 April 2018 9:00 am

There is famously no door into the late-night diner of Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’. Its three silent patrons are trapped behind…

Reducing the lead to an demented rape victim is just what ballet needs: The Wind reviewed

18 November 2017 9:00 am

A kindly cowboy, an East Coast bride, adultery, murder and madness. The Wind, Dorothy Scarborough’s 1925 Texas gothic novel (and…

The glorious Grand Pas from Paquita, part of the Mariinsky’s triple bill

Not vintage Mariinsky

19 August 2017 9:00 am

Not really a vintage Mariinsky season — an odd choice of repertoire and some hit-and-miss male casting — but the…

Mad about the boy

5 August 2017 9:00 am

Tall, handsome boys with long legs and beautifully arched feet do not grow on trees (if only). Every ballet director…

Not a repertory piece but in its dignity it earns respect: Royal Opera’s Oedipe reviewed

28 May 2016 9:00 am

For years I have been telling people that they should listen to, in the absence of staged performances, Enescu’s opera…

Vile body: Steven McRae as the Creature in ‘Frankenstein’

The Royal Ballet is literally losing the plot

21 May 2016 9:00 am

If a football manager produces a string of losses, the writing is on the wall and out he goes. He’s…

Predictably meh: Scottish Ballet’s new Swan Lake reviewed

7 May 2016 9:00 am

Every ballet company wants a box-office earner. But why Scottish Ballet’s leader Christopher Hampson kept on at David Dawson until…

Is there a funnier opera than Gerald Barry’s Importance of Being Earnest?

9 April 2016 9:00 am

Comic opera is no laughing matter. Seriously, when was the last time you laughed out loud in the opera house?…

The rotten fruits of Peter Maxwell Davies’s modernism

9 April 2016 9:00 am

The intransigence of Maxwell Davies, Boulez and Stockhausen is coming home to roost. Here were three composers, famous if not…

A new dance piece in which race definitely matters: Ballet Black’s Triple Bill reviewed

2 April 2016 9:00 am

Ballet’s romantic mantra could be summed up by John Keats’s ballad ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, in which a young…

Choristers from the English National Opera (Photo: Getty)

ENO must go

27 February 2016 9:00 am

Last week Darren Henley, chief executive of Arts Council England, revealed that opera receives just under a fifth of the…

Is Twitter now in charge of the Royal Ballet’s artistic programming?

5 December 2015 9:00 am

For all the billing and cooing on public forums about the Royal Ballet’s The Two Pigeons revival, there’s a silent…

Anna Devin as Alcina and Nick Pritchard as Ruggiero in ‘La Liberazione di Ruggiero’ at Brighton Early Music Festival

Has there ever been a better time to be a lover of Baroque opera?

28 November 2015 9:00 am

Time was when early music was a 6 p.m. concert, Baroque began with Bach and ended with Corelli’s Christmas Concerto,…

Morgen und Abend: the kind of opera that gives opera a bad name

21 November 2015 9:00 am

The Royal Opera House seemed nervous about Georg Friedrich Haas’s world première Morgen und Abend. They sent out a pdf…

Carlos Acosta’s incoherent Carmen is a disaster

7 November 2015 9:00 am

The love that asks no questions, the love that pays the price… The amount of unconditional love sloshing about at…

This Juliet needs a new Romeo

29 October 2015 9:00 am

You always remember your first time, don’t you? And in ballet one imagines that Juliet wants to remember her first…

The best ballerinas in Britain at the moment are hairy and male

3 October 2015 9:00 am

There was blood on the walls and floor at the birth of Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet in 1965. The…

Sylvie Guillem’s better than ever in her final, final Coliseum farewell

15 August 2015 9:00 am

The blackness that sweeps along the stage behind Sylvie Guillem’s disappearing figure in the Russell Maliphant piece on her farewell…

Ruben Gonzalez (Photo: Adalberto Roque/AFP/Getty)

The band that nearly saved the Cuban revolution

8 August 2015 9:00 am

By chance, my first night in Havana in 1987 was the night the clubs went dark to mark the death…

Inside Apollo’s head: designer Steffen Aarfing following Szymanowski’s stage instructions

‘Bewitching’: Krol Roger at the Royal Opera reviewed

9 May 2015 9:00 am

‘What gives your lies such power?’ asks the bewildered Sicilian leader in Szymanowski’s opera Krol Roger. The question is addressed…

Il Turco in Italia (Photo: Tristram Kenton)

Il turco in Italia, Royal Opera House, reviewed: bring sunglasses

25 April 2015 9:00 am

Big slats of orange, burning yellows, an Adriatic in electric blue: I wish I’d bought my sunglasses to the Royal…

Vadim Muntagirov and Laura Morera in ‘La Fille mal gardée’

La Fille mal gardee at the Royal Opera House reviewed: light, lithe and tender

25 April 2015 9:00 am

The current talking-point at the Royal Ballet is the Russians milling around. One can sound unfortunately as if one’s starting…

Tippett’s triumphant failure: Birmingham Opera Company’s The Ice Break reviewed

11 April 2015 9:00 am

The Ice Break is Michael Tippett’s fourth opera, first produced at Covent Garden in 1977 and rarely produced anywhere since,…