Babbling brooks, young love, broken hearts: standard topics for classical song cycles from Schubert onward, and for most opera singers a key part of their concert hall careers. Not for the 45-year-old US tenor Lawrence Brownlee, one of the...
Fiona Maddocks
Review: Hänsel und Gretel reopens Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden
Children, hardly a revelation, are not easy to please at the opera. A small boy spotted at Covent Garden for Semiramide – four hours of epic Rossini tragedy – must have been glad of the toy dog he thought to bring. His seat was empty by the interval. Few operas breach...
The Golden Dragon; Opera: Passion, Power and Politics – review
Birmingham Rep; V&A, London Peter Eötvös’s tragicomic opera about a Chinese immigrant worker cuts to the quick in Music Theatre Wales’s visceral production. At the V&A, hold on to your headphones… At first sight a jaunty skit on life in a Chinese restaurant –...
British Youth Opera; Vienna Philharmonic/Harding; András Schiff – review
Peacock theatre; Royal Albert Hall, London Potential opera stars seize their moment in The Vanishing Bridegroom and Don Giovanni. Plus, two miraculous hours of Bach from András Schiff If you shone a torch round the auditorium of London’s Peacock theatre in early...
‘Tell me what traditional means’ – director Richard Jones on La Bohème
He put Rhinemaidens in fat suits, breathed life into Turnage’s Anna Nicole – now he is directing Covent Garden’s first new production of La Bohème for four decades. Richard Jones gives a rare interview Pink floorboards, yellow chairs, green cupboards and five...