The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
They are lighting the candles at Covent Garden to honour one of the great singers of our age. Thomas Allen (as he was then) first appeared on the stage of the Royal Opera House in 1972, as Donald in Billy Budd, when Benjamin Britten was alive and his opera not nearly so highly thought of
Bellini’s Norma is an opera that I not only adore: it obsesses me, too. Whenever I listen to it, I have to hear it again very soon, and parts of it lodge in my mind, playing over and over again, to an extent that very few other pieces do. It was the work through which
When you see two of the undisputed masterpieces of the repertoire in one week in one of the world’s leading opera houses, competently performed, and remain largely unmoved, you’re bound to ask yourself the question: have I been to these things, and heard them on record, too many times? It is, after all, possible to
The Enchanted Island is a baroque concoction at the New York Met which has been widely touted and last Saturday was relayed worldwide to cinemas, a transmission that went less smoothly than any I have seen before, with some sharp variations of volume and a temporary complete breakdown. On the whole, the sound level is
Giulio Cesare was the first of Handel’s operas to return to general favour after more than a century and a half of neglect, and I suppose that it is still the most frequently performed. That isn’t surprising, since its plot is, by Handelian standards, simplicity itself, and the level of inspiration in the arias is
As I’m not the first person to have pointed out, the Royal Opera has indulged in a truly phenomenal number of performances of La Traviata this season, in the largely traditional production by Richard Eyre, which opened in 1994 with Angela Gheorghiu making her name. The three main roles have been cast differently for these
‘It is impossible that you should not have sensed,’ wrote Wagner to Ludwig II shortly before the first performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, ‘under the opera’s quaint superficies of popular humour, the profound melancholy, the lament, the cry of distress of poetry in chains, and its reincarnation, its new birth, its irresistible magic power
Bernard Levin once wrote an article in the Times called ‘But seriously, how can anyone compare Verdi with Wagner?’ (or something very like that). I can’t remember the article in detail, but its drift was ‘No one can seriously compare them’, something that I had and have always felt. Yet there is the temptation: they
Having seen and been most impressed by two New York Met relays of Wagner operas on the big screen, I was interested to see how the largely close-up medium would cope with a Handel opera, where the challenges are quite different. Both composers have single characters singing for large stretches of time, but, while Wagner’s
This year’s Christmas offering at the Royal Opera is yet a further revival of Richard Eyre’s production of La Traviata, which began the season and is being revived again early in 2012. The main reason I went again to an opera for which I usually feel distaste was to see and hear Simon Keenlyside in
Dante didn’t have the foresight to create or depict a circle of the Inferno designed expressly for opera critics, with intrepid explorers of new operas with social agendas as an extra. That was left for almost seven centuries until the Royal Opera House came up with the idea of the Linbury Studio Theatre, which answers
ENO’s new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin has created something of a stir by departing from the house almost-tradition of postmodernist, stunningly intrusive and invariably grotesquely irrelevant presentations that began in earnest sometime last year. The set designs for this opera, by Tom Pye, and the costumes, by Chloe Obolensky, update it to the late
Thanks to the generosity of friends, Mrs Spencer and I went to the opera the other week, an exceptionally rare event. Having grown up with the rougher edges of pop and rock music, the trained voices of opera singers always strike me as being artificial and overblown. And there is something about the snooty splendour
The time of year is approaching when Nutcrackers take over from opera, and then a further round of Traviatas gets under way. But that does at least mean that it’s also the time when the schools of music put on their end-of-term operas, and this season is unusually promising. Next week Sir Colin Davis is
I only very recently began going to live Met relays in the cinema, but if you can get in it’s very well worthwhile. In Cambridge, where the sound is so-so, as I discovered going to Siegfried, there is no hope of getting in except on the day booking starts. In Huntingdon, where the sound is
Rameau is the great baroque master who has yet to be properly rediscovered, at any rate in the UK. It isn’t easy to see why, when one contemplates the Handel-mania that has been sweeping the land for the past quarter-century. Rameau is at least as melodically fertile, his scoring is extraordinary and often extraordinarily lovely,
Compelling, succinct, elemental, The Flying Dutchman, Wagner’s first indisputable masterwork, wouldn’t seem to present any great problems for an opera house, unless his directions about heaving ships are taken too literally — very unlikely — so why does one never see it well produced? The Royal Opera has made especially heavy weather of it, but
Wexford’s remarkable opera house is as good a symbol as any of the Irish financial meltdown. The auditorium is fabulous, and not just acoustically. The building — funded by the Irish government just before the banks collapsed — is now the trump card that has preserved the Wexford Festival as Ireland’s sole surviving operatic gesture.
English Touring Opera, under the inspiring directorship of James Conway, is the most energetic and enterprising operatic company in the country, not only taking three operas round the country this autumn, and another couple next spring, but also touring sacred works by Buxtehude, Gesualdo and Bach to 15 destinations, mainly ecclesiastical. ETO is working with
Whereas Don Giovanni seems, for assorted reasons, to be unfloatable at present, The Marriage of Figaro is virtually unsinkable, with Così somewhere between. In general it seems that comedies go in and out of favour and fashion more than tragedies or ‘straight’ works, though Figaro may be a glorious exception, like Die Meistersinger. It is
Street Scene may well be Kurt Weill’s most successful work from his American period, but seeing it in as good a production as the Opera Group’s at the Young Vic was cause for both enjoyment and reservations. In the next couple of weeks it will be touring to Basingstoke, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Hull, so
Is it possible to write a great opera, or a great work of art of any kind, about Auschwitz? One thing is clear: it would have to be truly great. The very idea of a fairly good work, or for that matter a fairly bad one, with such a subject is absurd. And not only
Talent, said Laurence Olivier, was plentiful; skill much rarer. Genius in a performing artist is rarer still, but Olivier had it, and so does Christian Gerhaher, the Bavarian baritone, who presented Schubert’s three song-cycles last week in a series of concerts that brought splendour to Wigmore Hall. This was singing of exceptional quality and, just
The Royal Opera’s season isn’t awash with new productions, in fact until Christmas only has two thirds of one, but that was what it got under way with: all three short operas of Puccini’s Il Trittico, with Gianni Schicchi revived, and Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica fresh; they are all produced, and mainly very well,
Das Rheingold used to have the reputation of being a difficult opera, in that it not only lasts for two and a half hours without a break, but also involves a considerable amount of discussion, immense quantities of plot, and lacks stretches of lyricism, with a few obvious exceptions. It is one of the operas
Writing to his friend and fellow-author William Dean Howells in 1907 about the Prefaces to the New York edition of his novels, Henry James said, ‘They are, in general, a sort of plea for Criticism, for Discrimination, for Appreciation on other than infantile lines — as against the so almost universal Anglo-Saxon absence of these
During August the only opera-going possibility used to be a festival, of a fairly grand kind, but in recent years the small, ‘alternative’ opera companies that are proliferating have sensibly taken either to continuing throughout the summer, as the big opera houses don’t, or to having their own festivals. During August the only opera-going possibility
Opera Holland Park has as its speciality little-known Italian operas from the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th. It’s a period that seems to have been swarming with composers who were eager, somehow, to combine the ardours of Verdi with the larger symphonic constructions that were being created
Dorset Opera dates back to 1974, but I have only just been for the first time. The quality of what I saw and heard was such that I’m annoyed with myself, ashamed even, for not having been before. The annual effort begins each year as soon as the Bryanston School holidays start; everyone involved in