Glyndebourne Festival Opera 2024 Review: Carmen

(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, {…}

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

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 {…}

Glyndebourne Festival Opera 2023 Review: The Dialogue of the Carmelites

(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 {…}

Renée Fleming, Bryn Terfel, Roderick Williams, Shenyang, Sophie Bevan Headline London Philharmonic Orchestra’s 2021-22 Season

The London Philharmonic Orchestra has unveiled its 2021-22 London season. For the purposes of this article, our focus will be on vocal and operatic works. The season kicked off with Tippett’s “The Midsummer Marriage” starring Robert Murray, Sophie Bevan, Ashley Riches, Jennifer France, Toby Spence. Edward Gardner conducted. Performance Date: Sept. 25, 2021 Next up is “In Bluebeard’s Castle.” The {…}

Glyndebourne Festival 2021 Review: Tristan und Isolde

(Credit: © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Bill Cooper) Glyndebourne’s final production of this year’s festival is a semi-staged realization of Richard Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” conceived by Daniel Dooner and featuring Glyndebourne music director Robin Ticciati in the pit, accompanied by their resident orchestra the London Philharmonic Orchestra. It’s a production that boldly sets out several role debuts, in Simon {…}

Glyndebourne Festival 2021 Review: ‘Il turco in Italia’

Rossini’s operatic world is a crossroads of things: the formal conventions of arias, duets, cavatina, patter number, the stock characters of the Commedia dell’arte, a hotchpotch of contemporary patriarchal and orientalist stereotypes, and reheated scenarios from various librettists. How do modern audiences, relatively unmoored from this world, connect with these shows? A Brilliant Production In this new production of “Il {…}