Opera

It’s Arvo Part’s 90th birthday year, which is good news if you like your minimalism glum, low and very, very slow. Lots of people seem to. The London Philharmonic’s concert on Saturday night was a reminder of an earlier, less ingratiating Part: the dissident composer in Soviet-controlled Estonia. Hannu Lintu revived Part’s First Symphony of 1963, and there’s nothing remotely minimal about its opening. There’s a swagger of brass, machine rhythms and an onslaught of string chords in which the dissonances don’t feel aggressive so much as mischievous. This is a young composer taking a manic glee in piling on the wrong notes just because he can. A bold, obstreperous

Puccini’s Turandot is back at the Royal Opera in the 40-year old production by Andrei Serban and… well, guilty pleasure is an unfashionable notion these days, but I still feel a batsqueak of shame at enjoying it so much. It’s not the chinoiserie – anyone who believes that an opera based on an 18th-century Italian pantomime should be taken literally is probably beyond help. No, it’s a Spectator headline from years back that still nags. ‘Turandot is a disgusting opera that is beyond redemption’ was the gist of a review of this same staging by the late Michael Tanner, and if it was anyone else you’d put it down to

Last week, Barbara Hannigan conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in Haydn, Roussel, Ravel and Britten, though to be honest she had me at Haydn. It’s still relatively unusual to encounter him in a symphonic concert, and more than one promoter has told me that Haydn is ‘box office poison’, which is a shocking description of such life-enhancing music. Perhaps it’s down to sonic overkill. Bingeing on Shostakovich and Mahler has left our emotional reflexes distended and coarsened, and now we feel short-changed if every inch of the concert platform isn’t crammed with extra brass and percussion. Still, it didn’t seem to have deterred the LSO’s audience – or for that

Stephen Hough’s new piano concerto is called The World of Yesterday but its second ever performance offered a dispiriting glimpse into the world of tomorrow. A couple of minutes into the finale Hough stopped playing and the orchestra fell silent. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he explained. ‘My iPad is going crazy.’ A murmur of sympathy, mingled with laughter; then Hough signalled to the conductor Mark Wigglesworth and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and they carried on, this time without mishap. But we’d seen it happen, and until last week I’d have told you it was inconceivable. This wasn’t some rash experiment: professional musicians have been using electronic scores for well over a

I saw the world end in a Bethnal Green leisure centre. Regents Opera’s Ring cycle, which began in 2022 in Freemasons’ Hall in Covent Garden, has found its culmination and completion at York Hall, a rundown public bath better known for championship boxing. Tower Hamlets security staff scan you for concealed weapons on the way in, which is not exactly typical at the opera. Still, the Ring is not a typical opera – and isn’t art supposed to feel dangerous? But once you’re inside – and as long as you’re not seated within earshot of the bar staff, who clatter and chatter throughout – Caroline Staunton’s scaled down production transfers

Next week, after the première of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera Festen, the cast and conductor will take their bow. All being well, there’ll be applause; and then a brief lull as the creative team takes the stage. There’s often a ripple of curiosity in the audience at this point, because it’s rare that we get to see just how many people it really takes to make an opera. Standing near the composer will be Lee Hall, the writer of Billy Elliot and The Pitmen Painters, and now part of the most maligned – and indispensable – profession in all of music. He’s the librettist. In short, Hall wrote the words,

Maria is a film by Pablo Larrain, who appears to have a soft spot for the psychodramas of legendary women (Spencer, Jackie) and has turned his attention to the prima donna Maria Callas. It stars Angelina Jolie, who trained as an opera singer for the role, God bless her, and while her voice is sometimes blended with Callas’s – isn’t that like adding ordinary plonk to a Château Lafite? – it still feels like karaoke, albeit karaoke of the most elevated kind. It’s not Mamma Mia!. It’s not your standard biopic either. This is Larrain, remember. Plus linear cradle-to-grave narratives are no longer in vogue – even though I wish

Sir Antonio Pappano began 2024 as music director of the Royal Opera and ended as chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. Around the middle of the year, there was a sort of retrospective; a stock-taking, if you like, as he made the transition to this third act of his career. Warner Classics released a box set of Pappano’s recordings with the Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome, where he held the top job from 2005 to 2023. And Pappano published a memoir, My Life in Music – a masterclass in diplomacy. No beans were spilled, and they were never likely to be. You don’t survive 22 years in an international

John Savournin has been busy. That comes with the territory for a classical singer – things often get a little hectic as the music world barrels towards Christmas. But with Savournin, it’s sometimes hard to keep track of which theatre – which city – he’s in on any given night. ‘This week has been Pirates of Penzance rehearsals at English National Opera,’ he says: we’re a fortnight away from opening night, and he’s playing the Pirate King. ‘On Thursday I was bobbing up to the Lowry in Salford for Ruddigore with Opera North.’ He’s been swirling his cape as Sir Despard Murgatroyd since late October. ‘And yeah – whenever I

There was some light booing on the first night of English National Opera’s The Elixir of Love, but it was the good kind – the friendly kind, aimed not at the baritone Dan D’Souza but his character, the caddish charmer Belcore. In other words, it was what opera snobs call ‘pantomime booing’, and which, as a peculiarly British phenomenon, they affect to deplore. If it happened in Munich or Milan they’d brandish it as evidence of an advanced opera-going culture – proof that an audience has been so completely transported by a performance that they’re reluctant to step out of its world. But any singer who’s remotely familiar with British

I couldn’t love anyone who didn’t love Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. Everything – everything – is stacked against this opera. Offenbach left the score unfinished when he died, tormented with gout and pilloried by bores, at the age of 61. Some of its best-loved numbers were upcycled from his earlier hits, and at least one isn’t by him at all. Yet somehow, it lives. More than that, it soars: a tale of disillusion that glows with wonder and hope; a hymn to the sweetness of life and the miracle of art, held together against all logic by the sheer charisma of a composer who shot for the moon and

‘Theatre within Theatre’ was the theme of the 2024 Wexford Festival and with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford’s The Critic, that’s exactly what you get. Conor Hanratty’s production showed the interior of an 18th-century theatre, viewed from the stage. In the second act it flipped around to reveal the audience’s perspective. Were we now the audience? Clearly we were; which was awkward because where does that leave a critic? Obviously, one can’t be the critic because there’s already one on stage (the clue’s in the title), and as it turns out, The Critic isn’t really about critics, at all. Whatever – you get the picture. It’s all very meta; and more

Scottish Opera’s new production of Albert Herring updates the action to 1990, and hey – remember 1990? No, not particularly, and I suspect that’ll be a common reaction if you were actually around back then. The director Daisy Evans was a toddler at the time and she imagines a gaudy, tawdry small-town world of bum-bags, WeightWatchers and decrepit gas heaters. Loxford Village Hall looks like it hasn’t been redecorated since the year the opera was composed, 1947, and that certainly rings true. Blancmange for the May Day feast, though? I’m pretty sure that even under John Major, blancmange was a throwback. But Evans has a show to put on after

It’s rare nowadays to see a new opera production that’s set in the period that the composer and librettist intended, but they do occasionally come along. In the case of Leonard Bernstein’s operas Trouble in Tahiti and A Quiet Place, the time and place are basically the whole plot. Trouble in Tahiti dates from 1951; a sassy little one-act satire on America’s postwar consumer idyll. It’s practically perfect. A Quiet Place is from 1983 and it’s a sequel, set 40 years later – post-Vietnam and post-Woodstock, with the nuclear family in full meltdown. These performances, and this production, provoke thoughts that might rob you of sleep It’s a bit of