| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 11-Feb-2013 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | When Pushkin comes to shove: Kasper Holten's Eugene Onegin at the Royal Opera House |
 BILL COOPER.jpg) Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is one of the most beautiful scores in the operatic repertoire, and I don’t blame people who come to it looking forward to immersing themselves in the warm bath of the familiar story and music. For many of the audience – and, it has to be said, critics – Kasper Holten’s deconstructed Onegin clearly felt as if nanny had taken teddy away and left a book on German Expressionist cinema in its place.
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| 23-Oct-2012 New Theatre | Welsh National Opera at the New Theatre, Oxford: Handel's Jephtha |
 and WNO Chorus - Credit Bill Cooper_9.jpg) Handel’s Jephtha is an oratorio, rather than an opera. However, the story is one of high drama and emotion, and thus the work lends itself easily to operatic adaptation. The oratorio relates the story of Jephtha from the Book of Judges, in which the exiled illegitimate son of Gilead, leader of the Israelites, vows to God that if he should be victorious in battle against the Ammonites, he will sacrifice as a burnt-offering the first person to greet him upon his return. He is indeed victorious, and his daughter Iphis runs out to welcome him.
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| 18-Jun-2012 Garsington Opera | Garsington Opera's La Périchole bubbles and delights |
 The West End/Broadway musical is alive and well, raking in millions with its blend of light music, song and dance routines and not-too-taxing drama. But its spiritual ancestor, the operetta, is an unfashionable beast. Offenbach's weighty Tales of Hoffmann gets produced many times more often than his most popular operetta (Orpheus in the Underworld) and the others languish far behind, which makes Jeremy Sams's new production and translation of La Périchole for Garsington Opera into an unusual event.
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| 12-Nov-2011 The London Coliseum | True to the spirit of Pushkin: ENO's Eugene Onegin |
.jpg) Young man spurns the love of a good woman. Time passes. Man realises the error of his ways, but it is too late. It's not exactly the most taxing of plot lines, but in Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin turned it into a masterpiece. The genius is in the characterisation of the impetuosity of youth and its consequences, which turns this into a universal work: we have all had violent crushes, we have all had petulant quarrels, we have all been weary of life when it has maltreated us (or even if it has treated us too well), and we all have our regrets.
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