Meistersinger, Bayreuth Festival, July 2011
Posted on 31 July 2011Tickets for Bayreuth are hard to come by, so you know something’s wrong when people are disposing of Meistersinger at half price outside the theatre.
Monthly Archives: July 2011
Parsifal, Bayreuth Festival, July 2011
Posted on 30 July 2011The imagery is enormous, but the production concept is simple. It’s the history of Germany from before the First World War until after the Second.
Lohengrin, Bayreuth Festival, July 2011
Posted on 28 July 2011The video projections of rats fighting and metaphorically trying to take over the kingdom were clever, and I loved the opening of Act II with a dead horse and overturned carriage.
Tannhäuser, Bayreuth, July 2011
Posted on 27 July 2011What fun this was at the end! The production team were booed to the rafters with not a handclap to be heard, and Venus was so roundly booed she didn’t return for her second curtain call.
Siegfried, Longborough Festival Opera, July 2011
Posted on 25 July 2011… here at Longborough I wouldn’t have wanted Act I to last a minute less, because Daniel Brenna and Colin Judson were riveting as Siegfried and Mime.
Petit Triple Bill: L’Arlésienne, Le jeune homme et la mort, Carmen, English National Ballet, ENB at the London Coliseum, July 2011
Posted on 23 July 2011Roland Petit died less than two weeks ago, and the remarkable timing of this triple bill made it a wonderful tribute to his choreography. That I happened to go on July 22, rather than the first night was entirely fortuitous, and we were rewarded by an incredible performance of Le jeune homme brilliantly danced by guest artist Ivan Vasiliev, shown in …
William Tell, in concert, Prom 2, Royal Albert Hall, July 2011
Posted on 17 July 2011This opera is Rossini’s last, fulfilling a commission for a grand opera made five years earlier when he took up residence in Paris. The press had been buzzing with information on its progress, and in his book on Rossini, Francis Toye tells us that “On August 3rd, 1829, it was finally produced before an audience …
Tosca, with Gheorghiu, Kaufmann, and Terfel, Royal Opera, Covent Garden, July 2011
Posted on 15 July 2011The orchestra, under brilliant direction by Antonio Pappano, started with a bang and the tension kept up throughout. Lukas Jakobski made a strong entrance as the escaped prisoner Angelotti, and as he left, Jeremy White came on as a humble Sacristan followed by a madding crowd of children. All very good theatre, before Cavaradossi enters, …
Seven Angels, Royal Opera House, Linbury Studio, July 2011
Posted on 13 July 2011This is a story about the desecration of the environment, told in the form of gluttony and the abandonment of boundaries in the bringing up of a spoiled young prince.
Ashton’s Romeo and Juliet, Peter Schaufuss Ballet, London Coliseum, July 2011
Posted on 12 July 2011Frederick Ashton choreographed Romeo and Juliet for the Royal Danish Ballet in 1955, and it was on a smaller scale than the 1965 Kenneth MacMillan version familiar to Covent Garden audiences. Schaufuss’s mother and father danced Juliet and Mercutio in the original, so Peter Schaufuss is very much involved in this work, and he worked with Ashton on a new …