The Royal Opera House reopens its doors. It was not raining last night when I walked from Leicester Square to the Royal Opera House though the skies were dark and the wind was picking up. I was going to the first live production I’ve seen since March, apprehensive and intrigued. London’s theatres, opera houses and […]
Purcell’s opera Dido & Aeneas at The Vache – Preview
Baroque Opera at The Vache. With the cancellation of the main Glyndebourne season this year I’ve been deprived of my annual fix of country house opera. It’s a first-world problem – but now there is a first-world solution! The Vache Baroque Festival, set in the grounds of stately home The Vache in the heart of […]
The Marriage of Figaro 2020 – ENO – Review
The Marriage of Figaro 2020, English National Opera – London Coliseum. *Stop Press – The London Coliseum is currently closed due to Covid19* If you’ve seen Amadeus, there are parts of the Marriage of Figaro that will be strikingly familiar. As Salieri describes the Countess forgiving her husband, he recognises that Mozart’s music manages somehow […]
Fidelio – Royal Opera House – Review
Beethoven’s Only Opera, Fidelio, at the Royal Opera House. The hottest ticket in town this year – and I got one, thanks (probably) to Friday Rush! Why has this opera been such a draw? Well, partly at least because the hero, Florestan, was to be played by the German tenor Jonas Kaufmann. Described by Anthony […]
Madam Butterfly – English National Opera – Review
Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly What happens when you get an Oscar-winning film director to stage an opera? In the case of Madam Butterfly, directed by Anthony Minghella, first staged by ENO at the Coliseum in 2005, something extraordinary and beautiful. It’s a production that not only provides a new insight into the opera but also […]
Puccini’s La Bohème at the Royal Opera House – Review
The Ultimate Operatic Romance? La Bohème at the Royal Opera House. With our relentless hounding of pop culture icons through the media such as Princess Diana or Amy Winehouse, we are a culture just as obsessed with the ‘femme fragile’ as the late 19th-century audience for whom the consumptive female heroines of Giuseppe Verdi’s La […]
Alice’s Adventures Under Ground – Review
Gerald Barry’s madcap Alice’s Adventures Under Ground at the Royal Opera House. It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with […]
La Traviata at the Royal Opera House – Review
La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi – A Revival Worth Catching. It’s the 25th anniversary of Richard Eyre’s landmark production of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata and so with the latest revival having just opened at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, we were delighted to be asked to review. La Traviata has one of the great […]