Mainly Opera and Ballet
What a wonderful performance to open the 2025/26 season at the Royal Opera. This new production of Tosca by the Royal Opera’s artistic director Oliver Mears is updated to modern times, and superbly conducted by music director Jakub Hruša. It elicited huge applause from the audience — see my review in The Article.
This performance by the Royal Opera’s ‘B Cast’, Anna Pirozzi (Tosca), Freddie de Tommaso (Cavaradossi) and Claudio Sgura (Scarpia), showed them to be a serious A Team, with singing at its finest, characterisation at its most convincing, and musical performance at its greatest intensity under the baton of Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv. See my review …
This first revival of Keith Warner’s dark 2017 production, once again under the baton of music director Antonio Pappano, was musically thrilling, with Ermonela Jaho as Desdemona, Gregory Kunde as Otello, and Carlos Álvarez as Iago — see my review in The Article.
