Mainly Opera and Ballet
This remarkable opera by Richard Strauss has become flavour of the month with productions at both Longborough and Opera Holland Park. Its brilliant libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal juxtaposes a young composer’s new opera on the plight of Ariadne with a commedia dell’arte entertainment, both to be performed for guests at the house of one …
For his first opera, composer Julian Anderson demonstrates huge chutzpah in combining Sophocles’ three Theban plays (Oedipus the King/ Oedipus at Colonus/ Antigone) into a single evening of opera. The plays were not written in the chronological order of their events, and nor does Anderson take them in that order, ending with Colonus, written shortly …
This new production is by Christopher Alden, twin brother of David Alden whose many successful ENO works include the present, very successful Peter Grimes production, being revived in Jan/Feb 2014. By contrast, Christopher’s Fledermaus production, which I was not able to see on the first night, attracted very negative reviews and during the interval I …
After an unusually long winter, walking across Holland Park for the opening of the OHP season it seemed that summer had really arrived. As the orchestra played the Prelude to Cavalleria Rusticana the set opened to reveal Turiddu in bed with Lola, and after the chorus entered to sing of orange blossom, over a dozen …
Dreams or Reality? For Michel, a bookseller from Paris, there is something addictive about dreams, but in the first two acts the auditorium lights slowly come on at the end, as if he is waking up. When the third act nears its conclusion the lighting shows some promise of doing the same again, but it …
A ship bound for South America in the early 1960s is taking a German diplomat and his wife Liese to a post in Brazil. Steep stairways connect the upper deck of the ship to the hell of 1940s Auschwitz below. Nearly twenty years after the Second World War a guard and a prisoner of the …
Rigoletto himself was brilliantly sung and performed by Robert Poulton. He didn’t overdo the nastiness of this character, as sometimes happens, yet his determination to take revenge came over very well when he makes the fatal mistake of telling his daughter to go home alone, after showing her the Duke’s real character.
