Opera

There are worse inconveniences than having to wear a face mask to the opera. But there’s one consequence that hadn’t really struck home until an hour into Rimsky-Korsakov’s Ivan the Terrible. The citizens of Pskov are massing in the streets. The Tsar’s army is approaching, and Rimsky is building one of those surging Russian crowd scenes: bass-heavy chorus blazing away while ominous bell sounds — basses, horns and rasping gong — shake the orchestra to its bones. Suddenly a bloodstained figure staggers in and collapses; a refugee from nearby Novgorod. ‘Your brother-city sends its greetings, and asks you to arrange its funeral,’ he gasps. At that point, I’d have given

At the turning point of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Der Rosenkavalier, all the clocks stop. Octavian has arrived at the house of the teenage bride-to-be Sophie von Faninal as bearer of the silver rose — the symbol of a love that is simultaneously as artificial and as eternal as any human creation can be. Sophie smells real roses; yes, says Octavian, there is a drop of Persian fragrance amid the silver petals. ‘Like a heavenly, not an earthly rose’, sings Sophie: and her voice soars higher and purer than anything we’ve heard so far, suspended in stillness while Strauss’s orchestra shimmers around her. The thing is, in Bruno

At the first night of Glyndebourne Festival 2021 there was relief and joyful expectation as Gus Christie made his speech of welcome. Never mind the hit to takings from the closed bar and the necessarily half-empty auditorium; never mind the scaled-back orchestra and abridged score. The new production of Katya Kabanova provided the thirsty opera-goer with a long cool drink of world-class music and heavily symbolic staging. Janacek’s exploration of a yearning female psyche has parallels with Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. It lives or dies by its lead, and the Czech soprano Katerina Knezikova excelled as Katya. Casting off her worldly glamour, she was utterly convincing as the soulful

I’m reminded of an old Irish joke. A tourist approaches a local for directions to Dublin. The local, after much teeth-sucking and head-scratching, eventually replies: ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here…’. The news that, 75 years after her death, English composer Ethel Smyth has won a Grammy Award for her last large-scale work The Prison is as excellent as it is unexpected. But it’s also frustrating because, well, if I were setting out into Smyth for the first time, I really wouldn’t start from there. A ‘symphony’ for soprano, bass–baritone, chorus and orchestra, The Prison was the 72-year-old Smyth’s final homage to American philosopher and poet Henry Brewster: librettist, friend,

I don’t say this lightly, but after 20 years of opera-going, Luigi Rossi’s Il Palazzo incantato might just be the most baffling opera I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen Stockhausen’s Licht. It starts with 27 named roles and originally featured no fewer than ten castrati among its cross-dressing, all-male cast. This operatic game of Twister was premièred in Rome in 1642, where it originally played out over seven scintillating hours and nearly 3,000 verses of poetry written, incidentally, by the man who would go on to become Pope Clement IX. A plot based on Ariosto’s sorcerers-and-Saracens epic Orlando Furioso brings together every character you’ve heard of (and lots that you

It’s my new lockdown ritual. Switch on the telly, cue up the menu and scroll down to where the vintage movies gather — Film 4, or the excellent Talking Pictures TV. Then search through their early-hours offerings, and press ‘record’ more or less at random. Gainsborough costume flicks; Rattigan adaptations; anything with John Mills in a submarine — it’s all good. Then, next day, trawl through the catch to see what’s surfaced, and who wrote the music. On a good night you might get Vaughan Williams in 49th Parallel, Richard Rodney Bennett in Billy Liar or — bewilderingly — the fire-breathing serialist Elisabeth Lutyens, keeping herself in cigarettes and brandy

I’m still waiting for the Royal Opera to step up. Nearly a year into the Covid crisis and what do they have to show for it? One stonking concert staging of Ariodante, a couple of gala-ish performances and some operatic scraps. Where’s the creativity? Where’s digital ingenuity, the willingness to experiment, reinvent, adapt? Where, frankly, is opera? When companies with a far greater reliance on box office than the heavily subsidised Royal Opera can do their bit — look at Grange Park’s tireless stream of content, ENO and Scottish Opera’s various car-park Bohèmes, English Touring Opera’s monodramas and song cycles, Glyndebourne’s Offenbach-in-the-garden — it’s hard not to feel frustrated. We

Early in 1946, two men boarded a train at Euston and went trawling for talent. Audition notices were posted at town halls up and down the land: singers wanted, no experience required. Two thousand applied. One town after another, they lined up for Karl Rankl, Covent Garden’s music director, and David Webster, its general manager. Those who sang in tune were hired, £8 a week for chorus, £40 for soloists. An organist in a Harrogate church was appointed chorusmaster. ‘At Carmen rehearsals,’ recalled Constance Shacklock, a farm girl from Nottinghamshire and future star, ‘none of us had ever seen a Carmen before, let alone sung one.’ By mid-year, Covent Garden

The best moment in the Vienna Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s Day Concert comes after the end of the advertised programme. The conductor gives a tiny gesture, the violins start a shimmer of tremolando, and a ripple of applause spreads through the hall. At this point, if you’re watching with first-timers, they’ll look at you, surprised. Why have they stopped? And you smile, because you know what the conductor knows, what the orchestra knows and what even the audience in the Musikverein — those bejewelled Eurostiffs in their £1,000 seats — knows. We’re about to hear The Blue Danube, and music doesn’t get any better than that. Well, that’s how it

In classical music circles, Christmas arrives with the overture to Handel’s Messiah. Or so they’ll tell you. In truth, festivities kick off when you hear a ping from your phone and glance down at your inbox: OMG — you have to hear this! There follows, as tonic follows dominant, a link to YouTube and the 2014 Christmas in Vienna Medley — the occasion, still barely fathomable to anyone who believes that we share a common European culture, when a quartet of opera singers in full evening dress, and shimmying on the spot like a vicar at a Sunday School disco, attempted to cover George Michael’s ‘Last Christmas’. But not this

It is amazing what fine performances you can get beamed to your computer these days. Slightly less amazing is the packaging these events come in, when they do. ENO relayed free a concert of Mozart’s Requiem, but it was preceded by a snatch of Strictly, with a row of muscular young guys ripping off their shirts, before we entered the Coliseum for a heavily pregnant Danielle de Niese hyping the event we were about to see and hear. She is delightful, but I wish she hadn’t been compelled to tell us that, despite his hard life, Mozart was sending us a message of hope that everyone, however ignorant of classical

Covid has been many things to the arts — most of them unprintable. A plague, a scourge, a disaster from which many institutions and artists won’t recover, it has also been a great equaliser. Suddenly there’s space to be heard, silence to be filled. In a digital world no one cares about the size of your stage. All you need is a laptop and a good idea and you’re competing alongside the Met or the Royal Opera. In the case of the Virtual Opera Project it was a shed and a homemade green-screen. Oh, and a cast, chorus and creative team of well over 100. And did I mention the

The timing couldn’t be better. Just as the gates clang shut on another national lockdown, trapping us all indefinitely with our nearest and dearest, the London Symphony Orchestra serves up an opera that’s pure domestic horror — a story about what happens when we lock all the doors, close the curtains tightly, and turn and look our beloved square in the eye. Bluebeard’s Castle, Bartok’s only opera, is a single-breath sort of piece. Barely an hour long, just two singers on stage throughout, it’s a conversation that starts with love and ends with — well, it’s not quite clear. Torture? Murder? Imprisonment? Bigamy? Truth, certainly. Most of us don’t have

It’s quite a title sequence. Puccini swells on the soundtrack and words flash before your eyes. ‘Ecstatic!’ ‘Spellbound!’ ‘Passionate!’ ‘Dazzled!’ Champagne fizzes, ballerinas pirouette; for some reason Bryn Terfel hovers in the roof of the Floral Hall. The Royal Opera House is back in the game, bringing the uplift of live music-drama to an opera-starved Britain, and if you’re watching it online, the only remaining question is whether the offering on stage can possibly live up to the energy, colour and sheer affirmation of the Royal Opera’s on-screen intro. Don’t be silly. What we get is New Dark Age — a double bill that takes its name from its second

Offenbach at Glyndebourne! Short of Die Soldaten with a picnic break or a period-instrument revival of Jerry Springer: The Opera, it’s hard to imagine a less probable operatic outcome— even this year. I mean, Offenbach: the saucy skewerer of middle-class pretension; the dazzling, vulgar arriviste of 19th-century opera. It couldn’t have been more incongruous had the sideburned showman himself razzed up, bass thumping, in a pimped Renault 5 and started pulling skids on the ha-ha. He’s never been staged at Glyndebourne, and it’s not hard to guess why. The last time I saw an Offenbach one-acter done in the UK, it was Croquefer, a medieval farce that climaxes with the

The email from English National Opera was blunt: ‘Your arrival time is 18.25. If you arrive outside your allocated time slot, you may not be allowed entry.’ Perhaps, to habitual London drivers — if such people exist — negotiating the residential streets of Muswell Hill during a Saturday rush hour is all good clean urban fun. I couldn’t say. I just know that by the time I’d been marshalled into a parking space at Alexandra Palace, my no-claims bonus miraculously still intact, I was in no mood for an evening of updated and interval-free Puccini. Three hours later I was pounding my car horn like a Neapolitan cabbie. ENO’s announcement

I went to a concert! Not a livestream or download: a real concert, with real musicians, a real conductor, a real audience, and the real sound of Waitrose cava bottles popping open in the late afternoon. In some ways, this open-air gala from Opera Holland Park made it feel as if the summer season were back on. There were floral-print dresses and canary-coloured chinos; I swear I even saw a tartan picnic rug. And here in a corner were the critics, released back into society for the first time since March. When the correspondent of the Mail on Sunday ostentatiously upgraded himself to a better seat mid-show, it was like

The first time Alpesh Chauhan conducted Birmingham Opera Company, he was surrounded by rats: six-foot tall rats, singing Shostakovich at the top of their voices. There were singing cops, too, and a marching band wearing bloodstained wedding dresses, and this was all happening in a derelict Edgbaston dance hall best known as a location for the 1980s Central TV drama Boon. Well, of course it was. BOC is the company that staged Mussorgsky in a circus tent and Stockhausen in an abandoned chemical warehouse; its whole point is to upend traditional assumptions about opera. The big difference in its production last year of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk came from the