Tag Archives: Heather Engebretson

Werther, Royal Opera, Covent Garden, September 2019

A terrific revival, fully expressing the enormous subtlety of this Massenet opera under Edward Gardner’s musical direction. Superbly cast with Juan Diego Flórez as Werther and Isabel Leonard as Charlotte giving beautifully nuanced performances — my review in The Article.

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Der Ring des Nibelungen, Royal Opera, ROH, Covent Garden, September 2018

Keith Warner’s production of the Ring  alludes to connections with modern physics: in Rheingold  the tarnhelm deforms the gridlines of Cartesian space to the curved space-time of Einstein’s General Relativity, and in Götterdämmerung,  Siegfried’s Rhine journey traverses both space and time. In Siegfried  Act 1, Mime adds mathematical symbols to those already written and in …

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Werther, Royal Opera, ROH, Covent Garden, June 2016

After recently witnessing a famous opera contaminated by a director desperate to make his mark, it was a pleasure to relax into the comforting common sense of a production that serves both story and music. This fine revival of Benoît Jacquot’s very successful 2011 production by Andrew Sinclair sees a few changes. The persistently intrusive …

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