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Reviews, Stage Reviews

Glyndebourne Festival Opera 2025 Review: La Bohème

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(Photo: Marc Brenner) Considered one of the most beloved and frequently performed operas in the world, “La Bohème” is the perfect blend of  exquisite music, timeless tales, and romantic themes, an ideal first opera for any budding enthusiast. Its incarnations have included a rock musical, placing the opera in space, in a hospital, as well as a setting based in {…}

Reviews, Stage Reviews

Glyndebourne Festival Opera Review 2025: Le Nozze di Figaro

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(© Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photography by Richard Hubert Smith) By the time the current run of “Le nozze di Figaro” is concluded, Glyndebourne will have hosted its 600th performance of Mozart and Da Ponte’s perennial masterpiece. The opera launched the  country house enterprise in 1934 at the behest of Fritz Busch and Rudolf Bing, who wisely cautioned against Christie’s Wagner-shaped {…}

Reviews, Stage Reviews

Glyndebourne Festival Opera Review 2025: Parsifal

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(Photo: Richard Hubert Smith) A new production of Wagner’s “Parsifal” is always a big deal, given the imaginative and actual scale of the work and the special aura that surrounds it – a triumph of Bayreuth marketing, truly, to try and restrict its performances for so many years. But this new staging at Glyndebourne Festival Opera signals the first time {…}

Reviews, Stage Reviews

Glyndebourne Festival Opera Review 2024: Carmen

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(Photo: © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photography by Richard Hubert Smith) “Carmen” is unquestionably one of the most popular works ever composed and has become an almost permanent fixture in the repertoire of opera houses. However, this presents something of a dilemma for those creative artists and directors who desire to produce the opera in a more contemporary setting and feel {…}

Reviews, Stage Reviews

Glyndebourne Festival Opera 2024 Review: The Merry Widow

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(Photo © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Tristram Kenton) There was much to fuel the excitement around a brand new production of Franz Lehár’s “The Merry Widow” for Glyndebourne Festival Opera this year. It’s the first time the work has ever been mounted there, and it’s always a treat to see what the slickly-oiled operatic operation, with its six weeks of {…}

Reviews, Stage Reviews

Glyndebourne Festival Opera 2024 Review: Carmen

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(Photo: © Richard Hubert Smith/Glyndebourne Festival Opera 2024) The picnic hampers are packed, dinner jackets dry-cleaned, cufflinks wrangled, and drizzle forecast: the British country house opera season is back. It opens with a new production of Georges Bizet’s box-office stalwart “Carmen” from Glyndebourne Festival Opera, directed by Diane Paulus and conducted by Glyndebourne Music Director Robin Ticciati.  This latest version, {…}

Reviews, Stage Reviews

Glyndebourne Festival Opera Review 2023: The Rake’s Progress

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(Photo credit: © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Richard Hubert Smith) John Cox and David Hockney’s production of “The Rake’s Progress” for Glyndebourne can surely lay claim to being the longest-running staging in the UK. It is 48-years-young this season, and on its 12th revival between Festival and Tour, not to mention the numerous loans of the production to international houses of {…}

Reviews, Stage Reviews

Glyndebourne Festival Opera 2023 Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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Photo: © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Tristram Kenton Normally, ‘heritage’ productions make me nervous. The established stagings summon to mind lumbering Zeffirelli-esque spectacles and unwieldy, moth-eaten costumes. Opera houses resting on their artistic laurels, unwilling take artistic risks. The ingrained conservatism in the opera business that could even prove fatal for the art form.  But, Peter Hall’s production of Benjamin {…}

Reviews, Stage Reviews

Glyndebourne Festival Opera 2023 Review: The Dialogue of the Carmelites

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(Photo: Richard Hubert Smith) Whether you like Barrie Kosky’s stagings or not, they always have an enormous presence. Think of the Marlene Dietrich-inspired gorilla suit in his “Carmen” for the Royal Opera House, the inflatable Beckmesser caricature in the Nuremberg trial “Meistersinger”, or the eerie sea of ash and candles in his “Saul” for Glyndebourne. The latter, highly acclaimed, meant {…}