Mainly Opera and Ballet
What a wonderful start to Wagner’s Ring at Longborough, Britain’s answer to Bayreuth. Set in lovely Cotswold countryside this old barn of an opera house has made a speciality of Wagner, and under the baton of Anthony Negus has succeeded brilliantly. Here were the first two parts of the Ring performed to a very high …
In Thomas Mann’s novella Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice) Gustav von Aschenbach, a great man of literature from Germany dies in the warmth of Southern Europe. Made into an extraordinary opera by Benjamin Britten, the 17 scenes create a sense of inevitability in what can be seen as a Greek tragedy — see …
A magnificent new production of Tristan und Isolde, with set designs based on Wagner’s own, opened the season at Grange Park Opera this summer. Its previous staging was seven years ago in Hampshire, before they moved to their new home at West Horsley Place in Surrey. As a musical experience this was mesmerising under the …
A centuries-old lady retains her youth and beauty thanks to an elixir. In Karel Čapek’s story, the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II — notorious for his patronage of the occult — asked his alchemists to create a potion that would confer an additional 300 years of life. He was told to try it out on his sixteen …
Janáček pokes fun at philistines and anticipates Woke in this remarkable staging. Mr Brouček, a Czech Everyman, likes his beer, but his inebriation leads him on two imaginary excursions, one to the Moon among what we now call the Wokerati, and one to the early fifteenth century when Protestantism began in Prague. See my review …
The first year of preparation for Longborough’s new Ring has started with a very effective production of Das Rheingold.The excellent use of video designs by Tim Baxter shows Valhalla peeping through the clouds, and the approach to the rainbow bridge at the end adds a cosmic touch to Wotan’s dream palace. Musically wonderful under the baton …
With the recent shenanigans of Russia’s not-so-secret security services, this opera gives form to the history that partly underpins the current regime’s paranoia. Tolstoy’s vast War and Peace, embracing the defeat of Napoleon’s 1812 invasion, expresses the soul of Russia, and Prokofiev’s monumental opera acquired new impetus from the German invasion of 1941. Stalin was keen …
Hugely powerful and strangely life affirming. Janáček’s opera on Dostoyevsky’s novel about convicts in a Siberian prison camp might seem unpromising material, but the composer was a master at turning stories into dramatic masterpieces and this — his final opera — is extraordinary. Composed on hand written staves that did not always extend to a …
This great opera portrays late seventeenth century events in Russia before Peter the Great came to power. Musorgsky, who wrote his own libretto, invents some love interest, notably in the character of Marfa, though the true historical background and exigencies of getting operas to stage are well described in the excellent programme essays, which also …
This extraordinary opera by Arnold Schoenberg remained unfinished at his death in 1951, though he wrote the music for the first two acts already in the period 1930–32. The incompleteness is emphasised by Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito’s WNO production (imported from Stuttgart), by beginning and ending both acts without clear boundaries. At the start …
Longborough Festival Opera provided one of the most memorable moments in any Ring I’ve seen — as the lights went out at the end of Walküre a stunned silence enveloped the audience for at least half a minute. Wotan’s farewell to Brünnhilde over, a mist surrounded the god as he knelt by the sleeping body of his …
Alban Berg’s Lulu, mostly written in 1934, was only performed in a complete version for the first time in 1979. Berg died in 1935, and after his widow could not get Schoenberg, nor Webern or Zemlinsky, to write an orchestration of Act III she refused any attempt at completion, and so it remained until she died …
