Royal opera house

There is no such thing as a moderately good performance of Madama Butterfly, or, to be more precise, it’s not possible to be slightly or rather moved by a performance. As with some of Shakespeare’s plays, and most of Wagner’s music-dramas, one is either shaken and overcome, or refrigerated and indifferent. So it’s sad to report that Glyndebourne’s first ever Butterfly, toured in 2016 but now settling on home ground, is a stolid, undistinguished affair, with some decent moments and much that seems routine and a fair amount that is worse than that. Is it a good idea to update an opera that is set in Nagasaki to the 1950s,

They enter two by two. Grannies, mainly. Headscarved, mainly. Some locking arms. A bit glum. Like rejects from Noah’s ark. Passing through two vertical beams of light, they appear then disappear, shuffling into the darkness. From concrete caves, they begin to wail for the dead. We’re witnessing Artangel’s latest extraordinary commission, ‘An Occupation of Loss’, by Taryn Simon. The piece draws together professional mourners from all corners of the earth — China, Armenia, Ghana, Ecuador — and deposits them under a block of flats in Islington High Street. The Azerbaijanis wallop their thighs as they wail. The Venezuelans sob behind full face veils, the fabric vibrating in sympathy. Some pace

There is famously no door into the late-night diner of Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’. Its three silent patrons are trapped behind the plate-glass window — specimens of urban disaffection and isolation. In Richard Jones’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk it’s the windows that are so disquietingly absent. John Macfarlane’s designs propel the action of Shostakovich’s final opera through an endless enfilade of rooms. There are doors aplenty, and thresholds — of morality, sexuality and social status — are gleefully broached and breached, but each ultimately leads only to another domestic hell. If Hopper’s characters are goldfish in a glass bowl, then Jones’s are rats in a cage, and with the rat poison

The Shaolin monks are no strangers to the stage. Their home in Dengfeng is a major stop on the Chinese tourist trail and their lives of quiet contemplation (and shouty martial arts practice) are regularly punctuated by spells on the international circuit with Kung Fu extravaganzas like Wheel of Life and Shaolin Warriors. Quite how they square this six-shows-a-week-plus-matinees life with the whole monk ethic is a question for their Abbot or, just possibly, their agent (Shaolin Intangible Assets Management Co. Ltd. Yes, really). But they put on a very good show, the best of which is Sutra, devised by Belgo-Moroccan dancemaker Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and performed in an installation

At last, a great time at the Royal Opera: a magnificent performance, in every way, of Verdi’s Macbeth, curiously but pleasantly beginning at 3 p.m. This is the fourth outing of Phyllida Lloyd’s 2002 production, and the finest by a long way, though each of the previous series had its merits. If my memory serves me rightly, and it very likely doesn’t, Daniel Dooner, the revival director, has made significant changes to the production. What previously struck me as tolerable seemed, in this revival, thoughtful, imaginative and genuinely helpful to the drama, qualities that I had given up hope of experiencing in a major opera house. Oddly, that meant that

Janacek is the master of the operatic title. Think of the slippery, sleight-of-hand emphasis of Jenufa in its original Czech —Her Stepdaughter — or the elegant misdirection of The Beginning of a Romance. It encourages the suspicion that when Janacek christened his final opera, deliberately truncating the title of Dostoyevsky’s Siberian prison camp-inspired novel Notes From the House of the Dead, there was good reason. It’s a title that opens out a description into an implied question: From the House of the Dead to, where or what exactly? Where can you go, who can you cry out to, once you have crossed over into the underworld and witnessed its horrors?

One of the Royal Opera’s greatest virtues is the care it takes with its revivals, even those that are virtually annuals, such as Jonathan Kent’s Tosca, the unnecessary replacement for Zeffirelli’s classic production. Kent’s version, with elaborate sets by the much-missed Paul Brown, was unveiled in 2006 and now has its ninth revival. It is a sloppy affair — three stars thrown together on the stage and told to get on with it. Since there is plenty of furniture around, and two precipitous flights of stairs, that isn’t as easy as it would be in any other UK production. When movements onstage are as haphazard as they were on the

Spoiler alert: the final image of John Fulljames’s production of Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses at the Roundhouse is haunting. Ulysses (Roderick Williams) and Penelope (Christine Rice) stand facing each other at last, arms outstretched. But Penelope is on terra firma. Ulysses stands on the revolving walkway that has served as the stage throughout most of the evening. And though Monteverdi’s music has found stillness, the stage continues to revolve, carrying him away from his beloved — boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Or something. Like many of this production’s most striking ideas, it’s poetic in the moment, but doesn’t really work once you step back.

Everyone knows — don’t they? — that the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain is the UK’s youngest world-class symphony orchestra — an ensemble of musicians aged 18 and under that’s the equal of any professional band (and better than some). But it’s also the largest, and we don’t hear enough about the sheer sonic impact of hearing 157 musicians moving with absolute precision. Even the smallest gesture by an 87-player string section has a sort of heft, a physical weight and depth that you can sense in the air around you. Overwhelming when the whole orchestra is playing at full power, it’s even more tangible in quiet passages, as

Claude Debussy died on 25 March 1918 to the sound of explosions. Four days earlier, the Kaiser’s army had deployed its long-range Paris Gun, and as Debussy’s cancer entered its final hours, artillery shells were bursting in the streets around his home in Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne. This quiet modernist — who’d transformed music into an art of almost limitless expressive subtlety — died amid the thunder of mechanised war. The funeral was poorly attended, and as the cortège halted, curious shopkeepers glanced at the wreaths: ‘It seems he was a musician.’ The classical music world is morbidly addicted to anniversaries of major composers. It’s still unclear whether the listening public

The late arch-Rossinian Philip Gossett regarded Semiramide as a neoclassical work, vaguely and alarmingly suggesting to me a musical equivalent of Canova, a sculptor I detest. Actually, I don’t think the terminology is helpful. Nor is Semiramide monumental in the way that the programme book suggests. There is a notable lack of ensembles and of anything except accompanied recitative and arias. The duets are as rare as in Handel, and come as just as great a relief. The culminating duets in Act Two are as balm to the soul. They even remind one that there is such a thing. Semiramide is called ‘a tragic melodrama’, and derives from a play

A kindly cowboy, an East Coast bride, adultery, murder and madness. The Wind, Dorothy Scarborough’s 1925 Texas gothic novel (and Sjöström/Gish movie), offers rich pickings for dance narrative and was selected by Arthur Pita for his Covent Garden main stage debut. What could possibly go wrong? Pita has made some terrific dance dramas — notably 2011’s Metamorphosis for a treacle-glazed Edward Watson — but The Wind is a massive disappointment, looking thin and underwritten despite hefty production values. A miniature railway dollies pointlessly around the stage perimeter and the wind of the title is supplied in tedious abundance by two custom-built threshing machines (the cold front could be felt in

Dance is an ephemeral art. It keeps few proper records of its products. Reputations are written in rumours and reviews. And by reputation, Kenneth MacMillan was the dark genius of British ballet — its destroyer, if you listen to some. They think this country’s classical ballet reached its pinnacle under the Apollonian hand of Frederick Ashton, before MacMillan stomped in with his working-class neuroses and rape simulations and took ballet down to the psychological underworld. It’s an absurd reduction, since Ashton was quite as screwed up as MacMillan, but the notion persists of the two of them embodying opposite sides of the British ballet coin, order and chaos. Both giants

The Royal Opera’s one production that, it has always confidently been claimed, need never be replaced has been replaced. John Copley, vintage 1974, has given way to Richard Jones, in a production full of his trademark quirkinesses and mischief, though he is respectful enough of Bohème to keep his irony out of sight for the last two acts. Stewart Laing is the designer, with a separate movement director (I thought that’s what directors did) in Sarah Fahie. Snow falls continuously before the curtain rises, but the set of Act One inevitably strikes you as a gauntlet thrown down to Copley. Flat 7b, which is the abode of the bohemians, is

Not really a vintage Mariinsky season — an odd choice of repertoire and some hit-and-miss male casting — but the Covent Garden run ended on a glorious high. Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère is a lightly curried love triangle about a handsome warrior torn between his betrothed (a Rajah’s daughter) and a beautiful temple dancer. Old-fashioned? You bet. But the scenery is chewed with such relish and the choreo-graphy delivered with such radiant commitment that the three hours roll by in a lime-lit haze — you half expect an audience in dress uniforms and tiaras. The scenery, a pick-and-mix from the 1877 premiere and the 1900 revival, adds to the sense

Tall, handsome boys with long legs and beautifully arched feet do not grow on trees (if only). Every ballet director knows this and yet tall, handsome Xander Parish spent five years blushing unseen in the Covent Garden chorus. The London critics soon spotted him — a rogue tulip in the ensemble — but it was only when the Mariinsky’s Yuri Fateyev was guest coaching the Royal Ballet in 2010 that his potential was realised. Within months he had joined the Mariinsky in St Petersburg — the first British dancer ever to do so. After four years he was made soloist, then first soloist and, last Thursday, on the Royal Opera

If you want to see an opera director kicking a genius when they’re down — and I mean really sticking the knife in and giving it a good old twist around — Fidelio is usually a safe bet. It’s one of Beethoven’s few undisputed masterpieces in which he’s not in absolute command of his medium; instead, the sheer moral and emotional conviction of the music carries it through. Confronted with such blazing sincerity, the instinct (possibly defensive) of many modern directors seems to be to subvert, to undercut, to belittle. I haven’t seen a production of Fidelio this century that’s been content simply to help the work speak (and Fidelio

When a composer begins an opera, they create a world. You don’t need a full-scale overture: the tear-stained violins that Verdi drapes over the opening bars of La traviata do the job perfectly. The orgasmic upswing that launches Der Rosenkavalier, the cosmic hum that sets the Ring on its course — those very first notes tell you exactly where you are and what’s at stake. Puccini gets it just right at the start of La bohème: a cheerful orchestral clap on the shoulders that shoves you straight into the boisterous, bantering world of these four incurable optimists. Not here. André Barbe & Renaud Doucet’s new production for Scottish Opera opens