Mainly Opera and Ballet
Wonderful energy from the children, as various animals and woodland mushrooms, gave colour to an otherwise dull production, set in a wood yard. Some excellent singing from the Vixen, the Fox, and the humans who live in a far more circumscribed world than the animals. My review in The Article.
The first glimpse of what will be Richard Jones’ new production of Wagner’s Ring, for the English National Opera and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, shows some intriguing imagery. Rheingold will appear in the 2021/22 season, with Siegfried and Götterämmerung in 2024 and 2025. See my review of Valkyrie in The Article.
Harrison Birtwistle’s Mask of Orpheus is a complex, multi-layered composition, more symphony than opera, but high camp is not the right way to stage it. This was director Daniel Kramer’s swan song after his ill-starred role as artistic director, and confirms that the ENO did the right thing in dispensing with his services. My review …
This is exactly what the English National Opera should be doing: staging operas in comprehensible productions with a strong cast of mainly British singers. Sadly their bad press in recent years is partly due to productions that say more about the director than the opera, and singers from abroad who do not measure up to …
From a powerful start with timpani and clashing chords, illustrating the energy and activity of a busy office, this opera opens out into thriller. As Marnie steals and steals again, giving money to her crabby mother to assuage some mysterious guilt, you wonder what next for this strangely self-absorbed young woman, and as a friend …
What a superb end to the season, their last at The Grange before moving to the Theatre in the Woods now being constructed at West Horsley Place in Surrey. This Company really knows how to do things, and when Anja Kampe as Isolde, and Clive Bayley as King Marke had to pull out, they found …
At the end, after Onegin has clung uselessly to Tatyana and she has pulled herself away and left the stage, we see Prince Gremin walk across the upper level holding a pistol. A fine dramatic effect, following many others in this beautifully honed production. The splitting of the set into an upper and lower level, …
John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress, was imprisoned in the early 1660s for abstaining from Anglican church services and preaching at unlawful meetings — such things being no longer the vogue they were round the campfires of Cromwell’s army — and this opera starts with him in prison. There he dreams, and we follow …
