| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 8-May-2013 Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts | The stark glory of Robert Carsen's Dialogues des Carmélites with Canadian Opera Company |
 Francis Poulenc’s 1957 opera Dialogues des Carmélites has the virtues of necessity. Director Robert Carsten’s production puts these virtues before us in simple black and white. The virtues begin with the story: Blanche, an aristocrat afraid of the French Revolution who hopes to find refuge in a nunnery, becomes a refugee of religious persecution, and chooses to die a martyr with her sisters. The story is told with a minimum of props and no end of imaginative staging, lighting and costumes.Read full review... | |
| 19-May-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Robert Carsen's new Falstaff at Covent Garden |
 In the end, the big man gets the last laugh. Come to think of it, he also gets the first laugh, but for different reasons: you sense that Verdi steadily grew to love Falstaff in the course of writing the opera, as he turns from a coarse buffoon into a maligned old man and, eventually, into the spirit of laughter itself. Last night at Covent Garden, Italian Baritone Ambrogio Maestri was the perfect embodiment of the role: Maestri makes you feel that he loves Falstaff every bit as much as Verdi; a big man singing a larger than life role.Read full review... | |
| 22-Oct-2011 Glyndebourne Opera House | Glyndebourne's Rinaldo on Tour |
 Glyndebourne has a great track record with staging Handel’s works. In recent years, there have been great productions of Theodora, Rodelinda and Giulio Cesare, all of which have proved equally popular at subsequent revival and Glyndebourne on Tour (GTO) productions as well. This year, at the festival and now on tour, Glyndebourne staged a new production of Handel’s Rinaldo, his first opera for the London stage which excited audiences exactly three hundred years ago.
Read full review... | |
| 2-Jul-2011 Glyndebourne Opera House | Rinaldo at Glyndebourne |
 To Glyndebourne, for the opening night of Handel's Rinaldo, the first of his operas to be staged in London in 1711, when he was just 26 years old. The opera was a roaring success at the time and the most-repeated of all Handel's operas during his lifetime and yet has been over-shadowed in recent decades by his other great masterpieces, with the result that Richard's Carsen's new production for Glyndebourne is the first in Britain for over 30 years.Read full review... | |
