Ariadne shows what a wonderful operetta composer Richard Strauss could have been
‘Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface,…
Please let’s have more musicals like this Kiss Me, Kate at Opera North
Opera North’s new production of Cole Porter’s masterwork Kiss Me, Kate has been so widely and justly praised that I…
Incomprehensible genius
London’s Goethe-Institut has a two-month season of films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (whose 70th anniversary it’s celebrating), but only five…
All roads lead to Callas
Bellini belongs to that category of not-quite-great operatic composers whose works are also very difficult to perform adequately, and don’t…
Strauss-ful
Richard Strauss’s Daphne is one of the operas he wrote during the excruciatingly long Indian summer of his composing life,…
Watching the clocks
When I saw the first performance of this production of Ravel’s two operas at Glyndebourne three years ago, I thought…
Better than Bayreuth
Which of Wagner’s mature dramas is the most challenging, for performers and spectators? The one you’re seeing at the moment,…
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
For anyone who has been interested in classical vocal music since the middle of the last century, whether choral, operatic…
Carmen v. Carmen
It’s been a busy operatic week, with a nearly great concert performance of Parsifal in Birmingham on Sunday (reviewed by…
Triple triumph
Three staples of the Italian repertoire, performed and seen in very different circumstances, have confirmed my view that they deserve…
Beauty and the bleak
The Ice Break is Michael Tippett’s fourth opera, first produced at Covent Garden in 1977 and rarely produced anywhere since,…
The price of pleasure
Brecht/Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny was premièred in 1930, Auden/Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in 1951. Twenty-one…
Master class
ENO’s new production of Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg is a triumph about which only the most niggling of reservations…
Crime and punishment
In one of the more peculiar concerts that I have been to at the Royal Festival Hall, Vladimir Jurowski conducted…
Delusions of grandeur
Any adequate performance of Tristan und Isolde, and the first night of the Royal Opera’s production was at least that,…
A star is born
The Royal Academy of Music’s end-of-term opera can always be looked forward to because it never disappoints: the repertoire is…
Don’t look now
Mozart’s first great opera, Idomeneo, is not often performed, and perhaps it’s better that way. It should be seen as…
Sexy ladies
This season of live Met relays got off to a most impressive start, with an electrifying account of Verdi’s tenth…
Revival MOT
One of the greatest tests of how an opera house is functioning is the quality of its revivals. Both the…
Femmes fatales
Three operas this week, each of them named after its (anti-)heroine: one of the heroines (the most sympathetic) murders her…
Tainted love
During my opera-going lifetime the most sensational change in the repertoire has, of course, been the immense expansion of the…
Voice of enchantment
Some of my most enjoyable evenings, when I reviewed opera weekly for The Spectator, were spent at the Royal College…
Triumphant Tannhäuser
Seventeen years ago the Norwegian National Opera staged two cycles of the Ring in Norwich’s Theatre Royal, performances that have…
Virtuoso Wagner
It seems a very short time since I interviewed Richard Farnes about Opera North’s planned Ring cycle, the dramas to…
Dark night of the soul
Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites is an audacious work, much more so than many others that advertise their audacity. It deals…
