Mainly Opera and Ballet
This truly wonderful production by Jonathan Miller, now in its thirteenth revival, is a star in the ENO firmament, and a friend seeing it for the first time was bowled over by the costumes, sets and lighting. Under revival director Peter Relton, whose Tosca launched the new Grange Park opera this past summer, it looks …
Its narrow-minded Suffolk village setting makes Benjamin Britten’s only comic opera something of a counterpoint to his Peter Grimes from two years earlier. The plot is based on a Guy de Maupassant short story where the absence of a suitable girl as Rose Queen prompts the village matriarch to crown a Rose King, who then …
That this charmingly witty Jonathan Miller production is now in its twelfth revival speaks to its huge success, and once again we had the inimitable Andrew Shore as Dr Bartolo. His mixture of firm authority and bumbling over-enthusiasm, as when he gets his pince-nez caught in the harpsichord, was brilliantly conveyed, and this beautifully revived …
What fun this was! Terry Gilliam has done it again, following his opera directing debut with The Damnation of Faust in 2011. Mr. Gilliam’s earlier success was with a later Berlioz opera, and he has now turned to the composer’s first with a story involving the mad genius Benvenuto Cellini, Pope Clement VII and his …
