(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 {…}
(Photo: Tristram Kenton) Robert Carsen’s new production of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Aida” opened at the Royal Opera House back in the autumn; now it is receiving its first revival as the 2022-23 season begins to wind up for the year. First time round it was conducted by Antonio Pappano; this time an equally distinguished British institution takes the musical reins in {…}
(Credit: © Marc Brenner/Royal Opera House) In “Alcina” seeing isn’t believing. Handel’s tale of an enchanted island, which sees the titular sorceress’ captives transfigured into birds, beasts, and shrubbery, speaks of the pleasures and dangers of illusion. First premiered on the current site of the Royal Opera House back in 1735, the opera speaks to a host of 18th-century preoccupations {…}
Photo credit: ROH Salome © Tristram Kenton David McVicar’s production of Richard Strauss’ “Salome”, designed by Es Devlin, was first seen in 2008, and is receiving its fourth revival at Covent Garden with Bárbara Lluch at the helm. It opened the night following the death of Queen Elizabeth II – “Don Giovanni” the night before was cancelled in the circumstances {…}
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 {…}
(Credit: Tristram Kenton/Royal Opera House) Double-crossing, licentiousness, and the sad demise of a once popular showman: that was all going on down the road in Westminster while the Royal Opera House revived Damiano Michieletto’s double bill of “Cavalleria rusticana” and “Pagliacci.” Sightings of former prime minister Theresa May and former Johnson ally Michael Gove – himself ignominiously sacked by Johson {…}
(© 2022 ROH. Photograph by Clive Barda) Camille Saint–Saëns’ “Samson et Dalila” received its first new production – indeed first performance – at the Royal Opera House in nearly 20 years, replacing Elijah Moshinsky’s, which had a vintage of 1981 (before this reviewer was even born). It’s a tricky work to get right – traditionalist stagings feel uncomfortably Orientalist, sometimes {…}
(Credit: © 2022 ROH. Bill Cooper) Damiano Michieletto’s new production of Gaetano Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale” first hit the Royal Opera House stage in 2019, and now finds itself revived by Daniel Dooner. It’s a taut and challenging production of a work whose petty cruelties and incipient viciousness tend to be smoothed out by caricature, slapstick, and the desire to give {…}
(Photo: Clive Barda) David Alden’s 2018 production of “Lohengrin,” Wagner’s hokey fable of love, fidelity, and politics, is receiving its first revival from Peter Relton at the Royal Opera House. Alden’s setting is generic postwar Europe, all bombed out windows and bare brick, with buildings at precariously jaunty angles (sets by Paul Steinberg). In the ruins of this world Konig {…}