Posted on 31 May 2024
Antonio Pappano bows out at the Royal Opera with a superb Andrea Chénier. This verismo opera by Giordano is one of the great operas of that genre, with a superb libretto by Luigi Illica who wrote for Puccini and other Italian opera composers of that time. It brings the French Revolution and its bloody aftermath …
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Posted on 18 January 2022
The eponymous character in Verdi’s third opera Nabucco is Nebuchadnezzar II, mighty king of Babylon. The opera calls for a colourful production, but without the slightest nod to Byron’s imagery about the Babylonian ‘cohorts gleaming in purple and gold’, here was a mid-twentieth century, third-rate dictatorship, with bare-chested guards in braces toting AK-47s. See my review …
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