Otello, English National Opera, London Coliseum
It is 30 years ago – but feels like another life – that David Alden first exploded on to English National Opera’s Coliseum stage with his forever notorious cut-price staging of Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa. None of us there…
Rigoletto, English National Opera, London Coliseum
The hunchback slumps in his chair like some malevolent watchkeeper – master of all he surveys. But as the black front curtain is drawn back like a shroud or veil of deceit, the world according to Rigoletto…
Les Vepres Siciliennes, Royal Opera House (Review)
It started so thrillingly, director Stefan Herheim pulling off a theatrical coup which simultaneously fleshed out the opera’s back story whilst casting us body and soul into the gloriously opulent world of French opera-ballet. But as Verdi’s…
Prom 72: Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, Calleja, Zhang, Royal Albert Hall (Review)
It was too little too late to redress the scant attention gives to Verdi’s bicentenary at this year’s Proms but the “Maltese Tenor” – Joseph Calleja – arrived with an eleventh hour offering of low-key Verdi arias…
Briefly… Falstaff, Glyndebourne Festival Opera
It’s a world of girl guides, animatronic cats, and cabbages. Ford’s garden apparently yields nothing else. And whilst the flat surfaces and wonky perspectives of designer Ultz’ sets aren’t too prepossessing in themselves they serve the child…
Verdi “Requiem”, Philharmonia Orchestra & Chorus, Gatti, Royal Festival Hall
It was clear that there was an Italian on the podium. While muted strings invoked an atmosphere so crepuscular that that one involuntarily closed one’s eyes the murmur of voices intoning the words “Requiem aeternam” seemed to…
Verdi “La Traviata”, English National Opera, London Coliseum (Review)
So this is La Traviata laid bare, stripped of all superfluities (some chorus, all ballet, offstage reveries in the final scene), and played out “in secret”, as it were, behind closed curtains. Actually the director Peter Konwitschny…
Verdi “Otello”, Royal Opera House
It is the most resplendent of vocal fanfares that brings Otello to the stage in Verdi’s wonderful opera and Aleksandrs Antonenko – the latest in a most distinguished lineage (including Vickers and Domingo) to have strode into…
Verdi “Falstaff”, Royal Opera House
Where there’s Falstaff there’s food. And Robert Carsen’s new staging of Verdi’s final operatic masterpiece plays like an ode to gastronomical excess. It begins with a binge and ends with a banquet and even the scene of…
Verdi “Rigoletto”, Royal Opera House
Distressed and decaying amidst crumbling masonry Michael Vale’s brutalist set tilts and turns towards catastrophe like some sort of post-modernist installation. The Court of Mantua is a world off its axis in David McVicar’s much-revived staging of…