Peter Grimes, English National Opera, September 2023
September 24, 2023Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes portrays its eponymous character as neither hero nor villain. Like everyone else in George Crabbe’s story his life is controlled by the sea, their destinies forged and circumscribed by powerful forces, just as Britten’s was in the Second World War when he left Britain for America where this work was …
La Forza del Destino, Royal Opera, September 2023
September 20, 2023A man’s father is killed by an accidental gunshot. He holds his sister and her foreign lover responsible, and vows revenge. Despite the lovers parting, and taking sanctuary in religious devotion, they cannot escape the son’s undying fury, which in a scene of poetic justice reunites them at the end. The opera is based on …
Das Rheingold, Royal Opera, September 2023
September 13, 2023Wagner’s Ring, of which Rheingold is the prologue, attracts some appalling stagings, and at Bayreuth this summer tickets went begging for the previous year’s awful production. Now Covent Garden has taken the lead with a superb new production by Barrie Kosky. See my review in The Article.
Parsifal, Bayreuth Festival, July 2023
August 2, 2023Booing is par for the course at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, and the Parsifal production opening the 2023 season well deserved it. Singers and orchestra were another matter however. Most people go to Bayreuth because they love Wagner’s music, superbly played by the excellent musicians, and under the baton of Pablo Heras-Casado this was …
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