| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 17-Apr-2013 Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts | David Alden's edgy Lucia di Lammermoor triumphs in Toronto |
 Everything about the opening scene of this production set me on edge: centre-stage a hybrid bed on wheels, part crib part hospital, and propped up on it, peering through the bars, a young female, presumably Lucia. The set is a high-walled room, dingy white, plaster stained, paper peeling, with a short door and elongated windows suggesting a surreal Alice-in-Wonderland distortion.Read full review... | |
| 16-Apr-2013 Blacks | Donizetti as you've never seen him before: Pop-Up Opera at Blacks in Soho |
 The tiny room at the top of Soho members’ club Blacks is not the first venue most directors would choose to stage an opera, but Pop-Up Opera is not an ordinary production company. Established only two years ago by Guildhall School of Music and Drama graduate Clementine Lovell (playing café owner Adina in this production), the company aims to bring a traditionally exclusive art form out of the opera house and into the lives of average people.Read full review... | |
| 9-Mar-2013 Hackney Empire | Donizetti re-done: The Siege of Calais with English Touring Opera in Hackney |
 A very concise, two-act opera which tells a bleak wartime tale of sacrifice, rarely performed and never realised to the satisfaction of its own composer. You could be forgiven for thinking I was describing something from 20th-century Germany, perhaps an expressionist work taking after Berg’s Wozzeck or similar. You’d be wrong. It’s by Donizetti, and English Touring Opera are currently presenting this opera’s first ever professional British production, having started their tour this weekend at Hackney Empire.
Read full review... | |
| 12-Feb-2013 King's Head Theatre, Islington | L'elisir d'amore with OperaUpClose |
 Donizetti’s melodramma giocoso in two acts, L’elisir d’amore, is a light-hearted tale of love overcoming all obstacles, with the help of a little “love potion”. Tonight’s performance, in the intimate space of the King’s Head Theatre, was updated to Hollywood: the beautiful actress Adina (Una Reynolds) is being courted by Sergeant Belcore (Marc Callahan), who wants her as a “trophy wife” – much to the dismay of the lowly gardener Nemorino (Alex Vearey-Roberts), who is completely, heartbreakingly, in love with Adina.Read full review... | |
