Coliseum; Hackney Empire, London
The anarchy and invention of Simon McBurney’s Mozart production triumphs as ENO plays on; Puccini gets a rough ride at English Touring Opera. Plus, the pros and cons of Radio 3’s new schedule

A precipitous stage that tips and tilts like a raft lost in a stormy sea; glugging, gurgling sound effects; chalk words animated on live video; paper birds given flight by scurrying figures in black; trials of fire and flood that appear to engulf the entire theatre. The orchestra sits raised above the pit, solo flautist stepping from her seat to provide true enchantment as the story demands. At times the audience too – terror upon terror – is on the verge of participation as characters tear through the auditorium. Mozart and his librettist, the actor-impresario Emanuel Schikaneder, would have loved the pantomimic theatricality, the anarchy and invention and illusion, of English National Opera’s The Magic Flute , back for a third revival since its 2013 premiere, conducted by Erina Yashima making an ear-catching house debut.

A collaboration with the theatre company Complicité , directed by its co-founder Simon McBurney, the action moves in space as if without walls (designs by Michael Levine). Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a telling reference point. Bringing this complex staging back to the Coliseum at a time of such crisis – ENO’s dismemberment is an ongoing saga of management and Arts Council England shame – came with risk. We can assume the budget was shoestring, rehearsals squeezed to a minimum.

Continue reading...

Sony Classical, four CDs
This new recording is taken from stage performances of Kirill Serebrennikov’s divisive 2021 production for Vienna State Opera. Jonas Kaufmann leads a superb cast with Philippe Jordan conducting a recording that is amongst the finest Parsifals on disc

When it was unveiled in 2021, the Vienna State Opera’s production of Wagner’s final music drama seems to have provoked a mixed reaction. While there was almost uniform praise for its musical qualities, opinion was very much divided on the merits and relevance of the staging, directed by the Russian film-maker, Kirill Serebrennikov .

Reliving his experience of imprisonment for fraud and subsequent house arrest four years earlier, Serebrennikov had set Parsifal in a “detention centre for criminals” (by implication somewhere in Russia), in which the self-harming Amfortas was a dissident, protesting against the inhumane prison conditions, and Gurnemanz the inmates’ effective leader (and in-house tattooist). Kundry was a visiting journalist and Klingsor her magazine publisher, while Parsifal himself was another of the prisoners, who in the first two acts had an onstage double, reliving his experiences as a younger man through a series of flashbacks.

Continue reading...

Barbican, London
The culmination of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Total Immersion day exploring the US composer’s music, her first opera was obliquely staged but proved poetic and potent

Missy Mazzoli’s distinctive music draws on influences from the Baroque to minimalism and indie rock, reaching hearts and minds through a complex language that’s sharp, savvy and warmly inclusive. In the UK, the American composer is best known for her opera Breaking the Waves , based on Lars von Trier’s film, seen at the 2019 Edinburgh international festival. The BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Total Immersion day was a chance to get to know a broad cross section of her work, culminating in a staging of her first opera, Song from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt.

Following the deaths of her mother, brother and father, the Swiss-born Eberhardt took herself off to north Africa where she commenced a life of unfettered self-discovery. She rode deserts on horseback dressed as a man, outraged the French authorities, married an Algerian soldier, converted to Sufism and died at the age of 27 in a flash flood.

Continue reading...

Hackney Empire, London
Jude Christian’s staging for English Touring Opera is colourful and imaginative but lacks critical chemistry and coherence

The thing you really, really need to know about Manon Lescaut before the curtain goes up on English Touring Opera’s new production is that the heroine of Puccini’s opera is going to die of thirst. That idea does a lot of heavy lifting in Jude Christian’s staging. Designed by Charlotte Henery, act one opens in an empty swimming pool with water coolers standing like sentinels around the edge. In act two, the newly sugar-daddied Manon relaxes in a padded pink bath while watching images of splashing liquid on TV. In the final scene, with Manon and her equally doomed lover exiled in the Louisiana desert, it’s almost inevitable that Des Grieux will be flinging empty water-cooler canisters around in ridiculous despair.

Another thing to pay attention to at curtain-up is the sleeping figure slumped over a work desk. “The opera reads to me like a surreal nightmare and so that’s how I’ve chosen to stage it,” writes Christian in the programme – and if that sounds slightly defensive it’s not surprising, as this playful all-a-dream staging doesn’t do nearly enough storytelling.

Continue reading...

Grand theatre, Leeds; St Mary’s Bathwick; Guildhall, Bath
Opera North pairs Mascagni’s masterpiece with teenage Rachmaninov in a potent double bill. Plus, well-tuned extremes from Tenebrae and a blizzard of notes with Mahan Esfahani

Whether in the shadow of the cross or in the lawless freedom of an itinerant community, the upshot is the same. Love turns sour, reason is shattered, emotions run amok. In each of the one-act works in Opera North’s latest double bill – Pietro Mascagni’s popular Cavalleria rusticana (1890) and Sergei Rachmaninov’s rarely staged Aleko (1893) – crimes of passion result. This operatic pairing does not offer comfort, but its grip, thanks to a superb cast, chorus and orchestra conducted by Antony Hermus, is vice-like and dumbfounding.

The Mascagni is a revival from 2017, the Rachmaninov a new staging. Both are directed by Karolina Sofulak , who draws parallels between the works, written by young composers and premiered three years apart. Mascagni, 27, would never again have a success to match his enduring masterpiece, which he was still conducting in his 70s. For Rachmaninov, his student work, written at speed at the age of 19, praised by Tchaikovsky but now nearly forgotten, was only the start of a glittering compositional career.

Continue reading...

Opera a annoncé le lancement d'un nouveau navigateur propulsé par l'intelligence artificielle, Opera One, pour les utilisateurs d'iOS en Europe. Une nouveauté qui fait suite à l'ouverture permise par la législation sur les marchés numériques (DMA) de l'Union européenne, qui contraint Apple à autoriser l'utilisation d'autres moteurs de rendu dans les navigateurs sur l'iPhone.

Glyndebourne, Sussex
A strong cast and gleeful chorus enliven this revival of Annabel Arden’s insightful production, which plays up the opera’s irony

One of the many consequences of the cuts imposed by Arts Council England on England’s opera companies was the cancellation of Glyndebourne’s autumn tour . Substantial parts of the country now have no opportunity either to experience opera at all, or to participate in the educational and community projects that surround it. The autumn season at Glyndebourne itself remains in place, however, albeit somewhat reduced, and opens with a revival of Annabel Arden’s 2007 production of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore.

The first night was not without incident, as tenor Filipe Manu (playing Nemorino) began to feel unwell during the performance, and at the interval it was announced that his understudy, Rhys Batt (who was in the audience), would sing the remainder of the role from the side of the stage while Manu acted. Apart from a couple of tentative and underpowered high notes, Manu had actually given little indication of indisposition, and indeed sang the first act with his customary elegance and grace. Batt, with his darker, weightier voice, understandably took time to settle in to his duet with Theodore Platt’s Belcore, but his finely introspective Una Furtiva Lagrima brought the house down. On stage, Manu, very much the theatrical animal, was gauchely naive and touchingly sincere throughout.

Continue reading...

London Coliseum
Painstakingly restored by Ruth Knight for ENO, Peter Konwitschny’s production pares the Verdi opera down to its absolute essence

First seen in Graz in 2011 and taken into English National Opera’s repertory two years later , Peter Konwitschny’s production of Verdi’s La Traviata returns to the Coliseum for its second revival after what seems like an overlong absence. The company attempted to replace it in 2018 with a much disliked effort by its then artistic director Daniel Kramer, which was never seen again after its initial run. As with Jonathan Miller’s production of Rigoletto , similarly restored after a misguided decision to scrap it, ENO has wisely reverted to its earlier, finer achievement.

Konwitschny, who first came to prominence at the Berliner Ensemble in the 1970s, has long been one of European music theatre’s great iconoclasts, and his Traviata, painstakingly revived by Ruth Knight, is a radical piece of work, intelligent and hard-hitting in equal measure. Konwitschny pares the opera down to its absolute essence, cutting repeats and cabalettas, and trimming out the lengthy divertissement at Flora’s party. There’s no interval (which means the gathering tensions reach almost excruciating levels at times), and the drama plays itself out in 1950s dress against a simple set of multiple red curtains that successively open on new emotional worlds until death becomes an inevitability and the final curtain is black.

At London Coliseum until 12 November

Continue reading...

Royal Opera House; Barbican; Wigmore Hall, London
Ignore the fanciful plot and submit to the musical glories of the Royal Opera’s bravura revival of unwieldy Verdi. And to the top of the mountain with Vladimir Jurowski and co

Midnight strikes. Your lover enters through a window, ready to carry you off on a horse. Joy. He calls you an angel, reminds you of his Inca blood, and before you know where you are he’s soaring up to a top B flat (he is a tenor). Now – fatal mistake – your lover has killed your father. Disaster. Vengeance, bloodshed. Verdi’s La forza del destino (1862), of which the events described are only the start, is sometimes described as the composer’s most Shakespearean opera in its mix of high and low, brief comedy and tragedy. The comparison is less than helpful. Shakespeare would have filleted some of the more far-fetched plot coincidences, of which there are many, but that is another discussion.

Christof Loy’s production of La forza , new at the Royal Opera House in 2019, has now been revived in all its teeming and lopsided glory, conducted with wise insight and propulsion by Mark Elder. Presaging the new ambitions of Verdi’s late works, this four-act drama demands the utmost of soloists, chorus and orchestra. It’s excitingly cast here, with terrific choral singing and acting. The production slides around visually but lands, more or less, on a world of mid-20th-century Italian cinema, steeped in handsome religiosity and glittery tat (designed by Christian Schmidt, lighting designer Olaf Winter). Three dumbshows foreshadow the action. People writhe – who can say why – on the dining table. Muleteers and prostitutes bowl in, a touch of Weimar in their apparel. A wholly coherent production is all but impossible with this work. Musically, it thrills.

Continue reading...