Reviews

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...

Full credit, then, to director Olivia Fuchs, conductor Sian Edwards and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group for this imaginative, thoughtfully programmed and highly engaging contextualisation of the work - one which gave us not only eight songs for a mad King, but...

The musical memory had been jolted by the waltzing strains of Roses from the South, the arrangement which had kept an otherwise forgotten operetta alive in the minds of Strauss’s contemporaries and subsequent audiences. Written in 1880, six years after Die Fledermaus,...

Random drum beats, guitar noodling, rants about gig etiquette: a new opera draws together every live performance by the cult punk band – not the songs, but everything in between As the air is released from a bright red balloon, the stage erupts in a strict...

Already before Torvaldo e Dorliska Rossini had three of his major comedies under his belt (La pietra del paragone, L’italiana in Algeri and Il turco in Italia) and two successful tragedies (Tancredi and Elisabetta). But Torvaldo e Dorliska is a dramma semiseria — a...

And there’s more recent stuff, much more, mostly multi channel video and sound installations around the world that I won’t see All of Mr. Kentridge’s disciplines come into play in his opera productions, providing this prolific artist a rich palate of expressive tools....

Handel opera productions are famously fraught with troubling decisions — which voices to use, which gender to use for which voices, which dances to use from which opera. Sometimes decisions are made for you. Like, for example, Handel had no choice but to use the...

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, one of three characters in S/G was in attendance at all four main stage productions of the weekend, and of course was on hand for Wang’s enchanting 60-minute opera about her unlikely friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia. The sold-out...

Francesca Zambello has had considerable success staging the piece for other notable companies, and as evidenced by this richly detailed production, she has honed her insights to a finely polished interpretation. Ms. Zambello occasionally likes to flavor her operas...

Someone seemed to have lost about thirty minutes of music. That does not mean the production was not exceedingly enjoyable. It most certainly was. But for Handel purists this opus may have seemed more like heavy hors d’oeuvres than a hearty main course. I am far from...

It is a welcome discovery, chock-full of soaring melodies and surging phrases that recount the moving tale of the six burghers of Calais willing to sacrifice their lives in order to save the city and citizens they love from isolation and destruction. Rodin...