Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chords as bright and sweet as pomegranate seeds burst and spill in Turandot, a splinter of bitterness at their centre. Left incomplete at Puccini’s death in 1924, the opera is his most radical and most cruel. You can taste something of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in the instrumentation, a musky roughness that rubs against the

It’s Halloween, and right on lightning-flash cue enters an operatic ghost story exhumed from the grave of long-since-buried works. You couldn’t hope for more discerning grave-robbers than Wexford Festival Opera, however, who have long made it their mission to bring forgotten operas back to life. Mascagni’s Guglielmo Ratcliff is a proper blood-on-the-tartan gothic thriller, all

There are some things the French do better than everyone else. Cheese, military defeats and extra-marital affairs are a given, but what about opera? English Touring Opera’s autumn tour sets out a tasting plate of the nation’s Romantic finest, hoping to persuade audiences that there’s more to France than just Carmen. Debussy’s delicate tragedy Pelléas

‘Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance… Those Greeks were superficial — out of profundity [Nietzsche’s own italics].’ Thus said Nietzsche in the preface to The Gay Science. I expect Richard Strauss knew the passage.

Opera North’s new production of Cole Porter’s masterwork Kiss Me, Kate has been so widely and justly praised that I wonder whether there is much for a week-later reviewer to add. It’s not as if the work needs much exegesis or critical commentary, though it may be worth pointing out that what we hear in

‘Kiss me, Sergei! Kiss me hard! Kiss me until the icons fall and split!’ sings Katerina Ismailova, adulterous antiheroine of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Stalin was not amused by Shostakovich’s bleak black comedy but our culture would be poorer without bored wives like Katerina. Perhaps all that Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina and Laura Jesson needed

Is there a more extraordinary, more heart-stilling moment in all opera than the finale of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro? The Count, suddenly understanding his wife’s fidelity, begs her forgiveness — ‘Contessa perdono!’ Her answer comes like a musical benediction, but not until after the very slightest pause — space to doubt, to hope. It’s

Bellini belongs to that category of not-quite-great operatic composers whose works are also very difficult to perform adequately, and don’t seem to be all that popular when they are. But Welsh National Opera’s theme for the season of Madness means that as one of the leading exponents of operatic insanity Bellini is bound to turn

In anyone’s hands, Verdi’s Aida is not the easiest opera to raise up to greatness on the stage. How does a director spotlight hidden subtleties, musical or dramatic, in a libretto and subject so easily swamped by the spectacle of marching breastplates, roaring divas, Egyptian bling and the aroma and sway of live camels? Novice

Richard Strauss’s Daphne is one of the operas he wrote during the excruciatingly long Indian summer of his composing life, where he seems, in one work after another, to be looking for a subject worthy of his skills, and only finding one in Capriccio, his last opera. For that, he and his ideal interpreter Clemens

Is Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress anything more than an exercise in style? ‘I will lace each aria into a tight corset,’ Stravinsky told Nicolas Nabokov, and for most of three acts that’s pretty much what he does, deftly fitting W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman’s libretto to a steadily chugging parade of his smartest, pertest neoclassical

When I saw the first performance of this production of Ravel’s two operas at Glyndebourne three years ago, I thought it was the nearest thing to operatic perfection I had witnessed. But this revival is even finer. Whereas I concluded last time that L’heure espagnole was fundamentally an old-time bore that goes on for far

Caius Gabriel Cibber’s statues of ‘Melancholy’ and ‘Raving Madness’, their eyes staring blindly into the void, petrified in torment, once posed on top of the gate to Bedlam. In 1739, when Handel’s dramatic oratorio Saul was first performed, you could pay a modest fee to pass beneath them and gawk at the living spectacles within,

Magical transformations are a commonplace of opera. We see our heroes turned into animals, trees, statues; witness wild beasts turned suddenly gentle and even the dead brought back to life, with scarcely a raised eyebrow. But opera’s greatest metamorphosis — and one still less remarked upon — is the annual British phenomenon of country house

These are nervous times at the opera. When should we expect the gratuitous rape scene? Will the director relocate the action to a Croydon laundrette? Who might be booed, and for how long? With Opera Holland Park’s Lakmé, however, almost any of these diversions might actually be welcome — anything to save us from the

When is a rape not a rape? It’s an unsettling question — far more so than anything offered up by the current headline-grabbing William Tell at the Royal Opera House — and one that lies beneath the meticulous dramatic archaeology of Fiona Shaw’s The Rape of Lucretia. Unlike William Tell, however, there seems little chance

There’s no such thing as a tasteful rape scene — or there certainly shouldn’t be. It’s an act of grossest violation, of primal violence. It’s also a reality — and a growing one at that — of contemporary warfare, a ‘weapon’ increasingly deployed strategically, coolly, by armies rather than individuals. Setting his new production of

Which of Wagner’s mature dramas is the most challenging, for performers and spectators? The one you’re seeing at the moment, seems to be the answer for me. The better I know them, the more apprehensive I get about whether I can rise to their level, and whether the performers can, and whether we can pace

We opera critics love gazing into crystal balls. We’re particularly good at discovering Ed Milibands and backing them to the hilt. Postwar opera is full of them. Take Hans Werner Henze. He was considered the future his entire life. Yet watching a presentation of two of his chamber operas at the Guildhall School of Music