Alberto Ginastera’s opera Beatrix Cenci is a grim, not to say, horrid, piece about male dominance, savagery and debauchery and the desecration of the female body. Containing incidents of rape, incest, and murder, it is not everybody’s idea of an…
Hans Werner Henze’s Prinz von Homburg is a deeply affecting opera drawn, but distanced, from Kleist’s drama of the same name. He and his librettist Ingeborg Bachmann were concerned to use the early 19th century material on militarism, disobedience and…
The current revival at the Old Vic of Arthur Miller’s The American Clock prompts some thoughts on current trends in theatre productions and the problems that they create for audiences. In a number of recent revivals of the classics, there…
The charming little Silesian town of Opava has a population of only 60,000 yet still maintains a permanent opera ensemble, which tells you much about the state of culture in this part of the world. Rachmaninov’s Aleko, new to me,…
The Secret is a typically bucolic piece by Smetana, telling the tale of a young man Kalina who had won the love of Róza but lost her when her father disapproved of the match because he was not wealthy. Rather…
Don Carlo contains some of Verdi’s finest and most inventive music to underpin the drama of the encounters between the principal characters but it also poses problems in performance because its various themes – thwarted love, individual liberty, State versus…
Sometimes one is at a production which takes an innovative approach to a familiar work and during the earlier part of the evening the predominant response is one of irritation, whether this results from the weight of tradition affecting one’s…
Two electrifying performances by Rattle and the LSO: Mahler’s Ninth at the Barbican and Janacek’s Sinfonietta at the Edinburgh Festival. Honegger‘s masterpiece Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher performed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra under the inspired direction of Stéphane Denève. A superb…
Winter Solstice by Roland Schimmelpfenning performed by the Actors Touring Company A powerful but subtle exposition of the seductiveness of fascist-speak, given a Brechtian interpretation by the performers half-narrating, half-acting the text. A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed by Shakespeare’s…
DIRECTORS Olivier Py: Dialogues des Carmélites, Caen Stephen Medcalf: Idomeneo, Buxton DESIGNERS Markus Lüpertz/Ruth Gross: Una cosa rara, Regensburg Pierre-André Weitz: Dialogues des Carmélites, Caen CONDUCTORS Daniele Gatti: Rigoletto, Rome Ulf Schirmer: Ring des Nibelungen, Leipzig SINGERS…
The Teatro San Carlo in Naples might not seem to be the most obvious venue for a performance of Janáček’s Kaťa Kabanová, but the opera company’s music director Juraj Valčuha is Slovakian, the production by Willy Decker was imported from…
Rigoletto is such a familiar piece that directors wanting to leave their imprint on it are tempted to turn it into something grotesque, vulgar or – worse still – trivial. Not so Daniele Abbado at the Rome Opera. Although he…
Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera Anna Nicole tells the story of a woman from a dysfunctional Texan family who, to achieve success as a stripper, has her breasts enlarged. Initially experiencing success and marriage to an elderly oil billionaire, her life subsequently,…
Rossini’s Barbiere di Siviglia is so familiar that one tends to underrate its qualities both as a musical composition and as theatrical comedy. Its brilliant rhythmic patterns and melodic charms are combined with acute characterisation and amusing interplay. Modern commentators…
The Spaniard Vicente Martín y Soler was a contemporary of Mozart and indeed the musical style of the two composers is remarkably similar. Both had a gift for melody and a sense of fun while not excluding darker colours and…
Anna Bolena, one of Donizetti’s operas on the Tudors, performed in Passau but with an English director/designer, Ultz, as well as an English conductor, Basil Coleman. You might have thought that this augured well for an authentic presentation of English…
Prokofiev’s War and Peace is not the masterpiece which it could have been. Relative to the Tolstoy original, the first half focuses too much on Natasha, while the second, because of the need to placate Stalin’s regime, contains too much…
After disappointments this year at Wexford, the festival ended for me on a brighter note with a well-fashioned, solid double bill of verismo opera. No; not Cav and Pag but Leoni’s L’oracolo and Giordano’s Mala Vita. The Leoni is a torrid…
Let it be said at once that Mercadante’s opera Il bravo is fundamentally unrevivable; and the Wexford Festival should be congratulated – or otherwise – for its attempt (bravo!). The plot is unbelievably contorted and complex. After a fourth reading…
Dinner at Eight, the play by Georges Kaufmann and Edna Ferber, famously filmed by George Cukor, provides a good source for the opera, premiered in Minnesota last year and given its first European performance at Wexford. It provides a biting…