(Photo: Marc Brenner/Royal Ballet & Opera) Entombing doom in monochrome, director Robert Carsen’s 2022 production of “Aïda” buries its protagonists before they’re dead. Façades of forced conformity define it – popping through parades of khaki uniforms, authentic footage of exploding bombs and regimented training. A fictitious flag that features stars and stripes across red, white and blue confirm its commentary {…}
(Photo credit: © Marc Brenner/Royal Opera) N.B. In this performance of “Tosca” Russell Thomas replaced the previously scheduled Yusif Eyvazov, who was indisposed. Entitlement enlightens spectators on the contrasting and yet comparable personas of soprano Floria Tosca and barbaric chief of police Scarpia: spoiled brats forsaking all who block their way. Sways of a dress’s train portray the former’s annexing {…}
A truly packed house, a cast of operatic luminaries and a program of works chosen and compiled by Maestro Pappano himself; a Gala, fit for a KING, surely? Which is just as well because His Royal Highness King Charles III was in the audience as a truly surprise guest of honor, courtesy of a massive covert security operation that even {…}
(Photo: © ROH 2024. Photo by Tristram Kenton) It’s 35 years since Bryn Terfel delivered a barnstorming, roof-raising rendition of “Die Frist ist um” from “Der fliegende Holländer” at Cardiff Singer of the World. His battle then with the late Dmitri Hvorostovsky was as titanic as the great oceanic, cosmic forces that suffuse Wagner’s 1843 opera. Much has changed vocally, {…}
(Photo credit: © ROH 2024/Tristram Kenton) Had a family bust-up over the holidays? Don’t worry – it could be worse. Richard Strauss’ “Elektra,” with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal from his 1903 play of the same, took a dysfunctional family of the opera stage to new extremes, boiling up Sophocles’ tale of matricide in the Freudian pressure cooker of {…}
Photo: Tristram Kenton Expectations were high for Deborah Warner’s new production of Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck” at the Royal Opera House. Warner’s acclaimed treatment of “Peter Grimes” saw her in similar territory—indeed, the debt owed to Berg’s score by Britten is considerable—in a pair of twentieth-century operas about alienated outsiders, disturbed by the very society that despises them. Both pieces are {…}
In July 2019, Irish National Opera premiered “Least Like The Other” at the Galway International Arts Festival to a raft of fabulous reviews. The short opera, which lasts approximately 70 minutes, is an intensely disturbing work that explores the brutal and life-destroying system that led to Rose Kennedy having a lobotomy at the age of 23. She was born into {…}
Photo: Clive Barda 2022 ROH This first revival of Keith Warner’s production of Verdi’s “Otello” (libretto by longstanding collaborator Arrigo Boito) comes with a frisson of contextual excitement. Warner’s expressionist production opened in 2017 starring Gregory Kunde and Jonas Kaufmann, and tried to give the piece a more existentialist reading that turned away from the problems that skin color presents {…}
(Image Source: Covent Garden Luna Cinema Illustration_LR_RGB) The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and Luna Cinemas have partnered to offer London’s free open air cinema on Covent Garden’s Piazza. The program will include screenings of three works from the Royal Opera House. First in the line is Puccini’s opera “La bohème” on September 11, 2020, followed by Tchaikovsky’s ballet “Swan {…}