Opera

The setting for Il tabarro, the first drama in Puccini’s 1918 triptych of one-act operas, is not the Paris of tourists and honeymooners, nor even the Paris of impoverished poets and painters. On a bend in the Seine a Dutch barge is moored at a soot-blackened wharf. A tableau of stevedores and seamstresses unfreezes. Sirens blast through the oily haze of muted violins. A tart touts for trade. There is no romance here: no first love, no new love, no true love. Just ordinary sadness and ordinary yearning: a marriage bruised beyond repair, a dead child kept alive in his father’s memory, and a futile and fatal affair. The first

The three most moving, transporting death scenes in 19th-century opera all involve the respective heroines mounting a funeral pyre — partly, no doubt, a matter of operatic convention and fashion, but also recalling opera to its duty as a rite of purification. Berlioz’s Didon in Les Troyens, like her creator, is so relentless in her grasp of the truth that she fails to achieve anything but a vision of Carthage overcome by Rome, and ends in despair and execration. Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung rides into Siegfried’s pyre in a state of ecstasy, imparted to the audience with all Wagner’s unlimited capacity for exaltation. In Bellini’s Norma things are more complicated: Norma’s

Centre stage, there’s an industrial-looking black platform, secured by cables. The Three Ladies snap the unconscious Tamino on a mobile phone. The Three Boys look like Gollum in a fright wig. And Papageno, dressed as an ageing vagrant, simulates urination (at least I hope that’s what it was) into an empty wine bottle. Simon McBurney’s production of The Magic Flute could have been designed to raise the collective blood pressure of Against Modern Opera Productions, the Zeffirelli-worshipping Facebook group that’s opera’s equivalent of the Mail on Sunday letters page. In fact, I sat through Act One with a growing feeling of joy, wonder and admiration for how comprehensively McBurney has

It’s widely agreed that the most difficult form of opera to bring off is operetta, whether of the Austro-German or the French tradition — interesting that the Italians wisely eschew the genre (so far as I know), while the British stay with G&S and their inviolable traditions, including the audience’s laughing in all the right places. In the past four days I have been to two performances of French operetta, neither of them much of a success, for quite different reasons. Opera Danube is a young company devoted to nurturing singers who recently graduated from one or another of the many music schools. It works with the Orpheus Sinfonia, a

Opera North continues to be the most reliable, inspiring, resourceful and enterprising opera company in the United Kingdom, and all that without taking account of its extremely limited budget. From April through July it will be presenting its remarkable interpretation of Wagner’s Ring cycle in various cities, including London, so it may not be surprising that before that it is mounting much more modest fare — as indeed everything else is. Giordano’s Andrea Chénier (1896) seems to be undergoing something of a revival, and this new production in Leeds is the first time it has ever been performed in the north of England. It is normally mounted to satisfy the

Les pêcheurs de perle Met Opera Live This is the first production at the Metropolitan of Bizet’s early opera for a century, and it isn’t hard to understand why. What a tawdry piece it is, the kind of thing that might have been written deliberately to get Edward Said’s goat. Musically it contains one gem, the unforgettable duet for baritone and tenor, unforgettable any time you’ve heard it for at least a week. Bizet obviously knew when he was onto a good thing, for he recalls the tune countless times in the course of the opera. It has no motivic significance, but since he seems unable, in this opera, to

There are some operas, as there are some people, that it is impossible to establish a settled relationship with, and in my case Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande is one of them, in fact by far the most pressing one. I never know in advance how I’m going to react to it, and to some extent the actual performance I see is not the determining factor. I’d like, just once, to see the play and find out how I reacted to that. For Debussy offers such a vivid and sometimes perplexing counterpoint to Maeterlinck’s words that one’s reactions to the characters and their actions are always in flux — at least

It’s scene five of Kasper Holten’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Michael Fabiano’s Lensky is alone with a snow-covered branch and his thoughts. Well, not quite alone. At the other side of the stage stands the man he is about to face in a duel: his friend Onegin, who’s apparently arrived ahead of the appointed time and is listening to every word of Lensky’s anguished soliloquy. Except he isn’t: this is the Onegin of the present, looking back on a tragedy in his past. Or possibly imagining it? He can’t, after all, have heard Lensky’s words, for the practical reason that he wasn’t there. Can he? Oh, is that

How often do you get a chance to see two operas by Leoncavallo in the same city in the same week? Never, until this last week in London, when Opera Rara gave a concert performance of Zazà at the Barbican, and six days later the Royal Opera mounted its first production since the 1980s of Cav. and Pag. Both Leoncavallo and Mascagni are routinely thought of as one-opera composers. Zazà didn’t do a lot to undermine that view, and I doubt whether if it had been staged it would have made any stronger an impression. Like Pag., its libretto is by the composer: Wagner seems to have made that temporarily

About 15 minutes into act one of Jenufa, the student in the next seat leaned over to her companions and whispered, ‘They’re singing in English!’ And so they were, in Otakar Kraus and Edward Downes’s translation. Janacek was obsessed with the shapes and intonations of speech; for a non-Czech speaker, a first-rate singing translation is really the only way to make Jenufa strike home with anything like the immediacy and realism he intended. But even with surtitles, the effort is useless if — as was the case throughout much of act one of this performance by Opera North — the singers are almost inaudible. It might have sounded clearer in

Time was when early music was a 6 p.m. concert, Baroque began with Bach and ended with Corelli’s Christmas Concerto, and speeds were so portentously slow that you’d have to start the B Minor Mass shortly after lunch in order to make it home in time for bed. Those dark days — caught between Baroque and a hard place — are over now. Period ensembles have never been better or more numerous, Handel and Monteverdi are a staple of operatic programming, and even Vivaldi, Cavalli, Cesti and Steffani are making their mark. Baroque is back, and this time it’s here to stay. One of the biggest success stories of recent

The Royal Opera House seemed nervous about Georg Friedrich Haas’s world première Morgen und Abend. They sent out a pdf of the libretto in advance, which they only ever do when they think that the words or the plot are unintelligible. Thrilled to report that it was a double whammy. An introductory soliloquy was spoken by actor Klaus Maria Brandauer. He’s apparently an Austrian national treasure. I’m not sure he’d get a part in Hollyoaks here. He wobbled on to the stage in wellies, paunch, beard and alcoholic’s nose. He was the spit in fact of Ricky Tomlinson in The Royle Family, except he said things like ‘he’ll be alone

The Force of Destiny, ENO’s latest offering to its ‘stakeholders’, as its audiences are now called thanks to Cressida Pollock, the new CEO, is perhaps Verdi’s most interesting failure. It’s an opera with too much fine, even magnificent, music to be neglected, but it doesn’t add up to a satisfactory experience. Even epics, which Force is routinely categorised as, have their limits of accommodation. Henry James described War and Peace as ‘a loose, baggy monster’, but what would he have called Force if he had had the least interest in opera or music? There are times when we are longing for the central story of vengeance and fate to get

What is Glyndebourne? A middle-aged Bullingdon. That’s a common view: a luxury bun fight for past-it toffs who glug champagne, wolf down salmon rolls and pass out decorously on the lawn. But the reality is that it caters to those of my class (lower-middle) who want to boost their pedigree with an eye-catching essay in sophistication. The Sussex opera house was founded in 1934 by John Christie, a passionate and eccentric millionaire who believed the public should suffer for his art. He hated the idea of suburban businessmen ‘catching a show’ for two hours in the West End before falling asleep on the train home. He wanted his audiences to

This was a superb, thrilling performance, chiefly thanks to James Levine and his amazing orchestra – he got a tremendous reception before the opera started, an expression of the admiration and affection of the audience; but he and we in the cinema should be spared the sight of his conducting, now a matter of limited gestures and unlimited facial expressions. He timed the whole work more sensitively than I have ever heard it before, so that there were almost no longueurs, which is a remarkable feat. Choosing the, or more accurately a Paris version, even Levine couldn’t prevent the opening scene between Venus and Tannhäuser being tedious. It’s so much