| Date and venue | Title | Submitted by |
|---|---|---|
| 16-Apr-2013 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Die Zauberflöte at Covent Garden | David Karlin |
 How, I wonder, is it best for an opera company to treat a revival of a well-aired, well-liked, decent but not particularly radical production of a top ten opera? This was what the Royal Opera had to contend with in this season’s revival of David McVicar’s 2003 setting of Die Zauberflöte: many in the audience will have known every note of the opera, and several will have been thoroughly familiar with the production.
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| 30-Mar-2013 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | The chorus takes the honours in the Royal Opera's Nabucco | David Karlin |
 “Fly, my thoughts, on gilded wings; fly to rest on hills and mounts.” It’s no understatement to say that Va, pensiero, the Act 3 chorus of the Hebrew slaves in Nabucco, catapulted Giuseppe Verdi to lasting fame. It remains one of the biggest moments in any opera, and the Royal Opera Chorus performed it superbly last night. It was a sort of collective messa di voce, swelling from gentle yearning to the full-voiced nostalgia in the third verse modulation, dying back to an almost whispered ending.
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| 8-Mar-2013 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | New opera, ancient tales: George Benjamin's Written on skin at the Royal Opera | David Karlin |
 21st century opera is a broad church. There aren’t many of us, I suppose, who are intimately familiar with the biographical accounts of the lives of 13th century troubadours, popular at the time in Spain and south west France. But Martin Crimp and George Benjamin, librettist and composer of Written on skin, aren’t exactly run of the mill people.
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| 2-Mar-2013 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | All round excellence in the Royal Opera's Tosca | David Karlin |
 Few operas are as specific in time and place as Puccini's Tosca: the date is 17th June, 1800, shortly after the battle of Marengo (in which Napoleon Bonaparte wrested control of Northern Italy from Austria), while each of the three acts is located in a specific landmark in Rome: the church of Sant'Andrea della Valle, the Palazzo Farnese and the Castel Sant'Angelo. But few are as universal in theme: the brutal abuse of power in a police state, where a single weakness can cost your life and those of your loved ones.
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| 11-Feb-2013 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | When Pushkin comes to shove: Kasper Holten's Eugene Onegin at the Royal Opera House | Roger Smith |
 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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| 17-Jan-2013 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Birtwistle's Minotaur at Covent Garden: Impressive but sterile | David Karlin |
 Revivals of 21st century operas on the stages of major houses are rarer than hens' teeth, so the Royal Opera were making a strong statement when they announced the revival of Harrison Birtwistle's 2008 The Minotaur, with the original director and much of the original cast.
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| 6-Dec-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | 120 years on: Meyerbeer's Robert le diable returns to Covent Garden | David Karlin |
 COOPER2.jpg) Robert le diable’s 1831 opening was perhaps the most successful opera première of all time. Meyerbeer was lauded by luminaries like Chopin, Dumas, Balzac and Heinrich Heine, the opera was played in 69 cities in its first two years and spawned an entire genre of French Grand Opera. Why, then, has it fallen from grace, last night’s Covent Garden production being the first since 1890?
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| 13-Nov-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Donizetti's elixir is still a winning formula at Covent Garden | David Karlin |
 ASHMORE-bt.jpg) Take one hapless but lovable hero, one capricious but ultimately vulnerable heroine, a doctor and an army officer straight out of commedia dell’arte, a couple of basso buffo patter songs, at least one memorable romantic ballad, and stir the lot into a good lashing of boisterous Italian music with a sprinkling of furtive tears. Donizetti’s formula for L’Elisir d’Amore may not have made all the girls fall at his feet, it did bring him money and enduring fame beyond even the wildest predictions that could have been made by the quack Dr. Dulcamara.
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| 24-Oct-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | The cycle concludes: Götterdämmerung at the Royal Opera | David Karlin |
 Monumental in scale and scope, Götterdämmerung is a work to which it is hard to be indifferent. For many, the idea of an evening of fantasy opera lasting nearly seven hours is unimaginable, so uncongenial is the subject material and so great the attention span demanded. For Wagner fans - and Ring fans in particular - it's a riveting theatrical and musical experience, the zenith of opera as an art form. Last night at Covent Garden was my first live Götterdämmerung, spent in the company of around three thousand of those fans.
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| 18-Oct-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Connolly and Terfel stand out in a thought-provoking Walküre at Covent Garden | David Karlin |
 If you've been brought up with the Judaeo-Christian ideal of an all-powerful, all-good God, Norse mythology can come as a bit of a shock. Wotan, the father of the gods, is philandering, deceitful, power-hungry, sentimental, violent and ultimately weak - the gamut of human frailties writ large. Combine all of those with a magic spear and the ability to control the weather and you know that things aren't going to end well.
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| 19-Jul-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Jette Parker Young Artists Tenth Anniversary celebrated at ROH: Il Viaggio a Reims | Katy S. Austin |
 BARDA.jpg) The Tenth Anniversary of the Royal Opera House’s Jette Parker Young Artists Scheme is a landmark of no small size. This summer performance brought back some of the best singers it has produced for a semi-staged rendition of Rossini’s one-act 1825 opera Il Viaggio a Reims. It was a celebratory display of virtuoso held together with a generous dose of self-indulgence.
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| 12-Jul-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Shakespeare Sung: Otello at Covent Garden | Paul Kilbey |
 KENTON.jpg) Giuseppe Verdi and Arrigo Boito's Otello is renowned as one of the few truly successful Shakespearean operas, and while it's mostly a masterpiece on its own terms rather than Shakespeare's – countless scenes and characters are cut, and the very Verdian drinking song goes on far longer than you'd probably expect – there remains a hint of the brilliance of characterisation with which Shakespeare's play is filled. It is a true operatic tragedy, and Otello's decline is devastating in its effect.
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| 25-Jun-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Berlioz's magnum opus Les Troyens at Covent Garden | David Karlin |
 It's one of the most famous, most studied, most archetypal passages in epic poetry: in Book I of Virgil's Aeneid, the Trojans, exhausted from their voyage and desolate at the loss of their city, gaze down on the city of Carthage as it rises from the African soil, its people scurrying like worker bees in their manifold tasks. It provided the high point in the Royal Opera's new staging of Berlioz's magnum opus Les Troyens last night: a brightly costumed chorus singing down from a terraced city carved into a red sandstone cliff, inspired by views of Morocco.
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| 31-May-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Wilde Headonism: Strauss’s Salome at the Royal Opera House | David Fay |
 BARDA.jpg) Few live events could offer a more intense, visceral, grotesque experience than witnessing a performance of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome translated and adapted for the opera stage by Hermann Lachmann and set to music by Richard Strauss. Wilde’s decadentist retelling of the biblical tale takes no prisoners, rejoicing in hedonism, passion, corruption and depravity, pouring over with lust, guts and gore. Similarly, Strauss’s score is relentless in its fin-de-siècle, over-ripe Romanticism; its raw, wriggling lasciviousness; its constant, compulsive excessiveness.Read full review... | ||
| 19-May-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Robert Carsen's new Falstaff at Covent Garden | David Karlin |
 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... | ||
| 30-Apr-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Bychkov conducts Calleja and Giannattasio in an immaculate Bohème | David Karlin |
 COOPER.jpg) After years of opera going, is it really still possible for me to be moved to tears by a tenor’s wail at the sight of a consumptive heroine dying tunefully in her bed at the end of the last act? I didn’t think so, but on the basis of last night’s Covent Garden performance of La Bohème, the answer would appear to be yes.
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| 19-Apr-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | La Fille du Régiment at Covent Garden | David Karlin |
 The nationality of Gaetano Donizetti's La Fille du Régiment is as confused as that of its eponymous heroine. Written by a homesick Italian expatriate for that most Parisian of venues the Opéra-Comique, it both continued Donizetti's Italian colonisation of the Paris opera scene (much bemoaned by Berlioz) and showed him adapting his style to the conventions of French theatre.
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| 30-Mar-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Rigoletto at the Royal Opera | David Karlin |
 Verdi's Rigoletto is a work of contrasts. The Duke is equally at home in a glittering palace or a tawdry brothel (a historically accurate characterisation of King Francis I of France, on whom his character is based); his romantic ballads are juxtaposed with the musical depiction of violent storms. Pretty courtly dances share the stage with powerful orchestral evocations of impending doom.Read full review... | ||
| 12-Mar-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Judith Weir's Miss Fortune at Covent Garden | David Karlin |
 COOPER (1).jpg) There’s usually plenty of hype surrounding a newly written opera performed at Covent Garden, but the carefully placed stories about Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune are on the improbable end of the scale, featuring a flying kebab shop and a team of breakdancers. So I arrived at Miss Fortune without any real idea of what I was going to get. A short 90 minutes of music later, I’m still not entirely sure what it is I’ve just seen.
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| 27-Feb-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Rusalka comes from Salzburg to the Royal Opera | David Karlin |
 BARDA.jpg) Most of Dvořák's ten operas are rarely performed, but Rusalka, his tragic fairy tale of the water nymph who takes human form, has become popular in recent years and is a regular visitor to British opera houses. Last night's production, by directors Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito, started life at the 2008 Salzburg festival and has now arrived in Covent Garden. I found it an evening of opposites: seldom have my feelings been so polarised about different aspects of a production.
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| 16-Feb-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Schrott thrills in a mixed Don Giovanni | David Karlin |
 It's the most spectacular entrance in opera: the giant stone statue bursts in to join Don Giovanni at the dinner table; a pair of sweeping downward octave swoops in D minor fills the audience (and the hapless Leporello) with terror at the rake's imminent descent into hell.
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| 11-Feb-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Figaro's wedding makes perfect comedy | David Karlin |
 There's no such thing as a perfect comic opera, and I know it's wrong to describe any work of art as perfect. But seeing Mozart and da Ponte's Le Nozze di Figaro last night, I found this a difficult principle to accept: this opera is about as close as you can get.
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| 27-Jan-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Miller's no-frills Mozart is back: Così fan tutte at the Royal Opera House | Francesca Vella |
 PERSSON.jpg) The last opera of the Mozart/Da Ponte cycle – the second of the composer’s operas to be performed in this Mozart-dominated season at the Royal Opera House – Così fan tutte pivots on two pairs of young lovers whose affection is put to the test by an old ‘philosopher’, Don Alfonso. Women, the old man argues, are all the same: never constant in their love, never loyal to their men. It takes three hours of musical comedy and a long list of artfully arranged expedients to demonstrate the sage’s maxim.Read full review... | ||
| 28-Nov-2011 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Something for everyone in La Traviata at the Royal Opera | David Karlin |
 ASHMORE.jpg) A glittering high society romance. A sordid tale of a prostitute born in the gutter and dying alone and painfully. A bel canto charmer, packed with glorious tunes. A scathing attack on Victorian sexual hypocrisy. Verdi's La Traviata is all of these things: find in it what you will.
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| 2-Nov-2011 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Eglise Gutiérrez sparkles in a sleepy Covent Garden Sonnambula | David Karlin |
 COOPER.jpg) When you discover your bride-to-be in another man's bed on the eve of your wedding day, the excuse "Darling, I must have been sleepwalking" rates somewhere near the same level of credibility as "Sir, the dog ate my homework." But hey, this is opera, and bel canto opera at that. You didn't come to Bellini's La Sonnambula for the story and the drama: you came here for the singing.
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| 27-Oct-2011 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | The Royal Opera House celebrate Placido Domingo's forty years of Covent Garden performances | Laura Kate Wilson |
 ASHMORE.jpg) In 1971, the thirty year-old Placido Domingo made his Covent Garden début as Cavaradossi in Puccini's Tosca and in the intervening forty years, he has given two hundred and thirty performances in more than twenty-five roles for Royal Opera House audiences.Read full review... | ||
| 18-Oct-2011 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Ghostly ships and demonic captains ahoy: Der Fliegende Holländer at Covent Garden | David Karlin |
 As The Flying Dutchman nears its close, the crew of Daland's ship are celebrating their safe homecoming and yelling at the Dutchman's unseen crew to join them. To their horror, they realise that they have indeed woken the dead: the Dutchman's crew are ghosts who have wandered the oceans for centuries: the storms cannot burst their sails for they are protected by Satan.
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| 18-Sep-2011 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | A star-studded Faust at the Royal Opera | David Karlin |
 CATHERINE ASHMORE.jpg) In this Royal Opera production of Gounod's Faust, there's no question about who's in charge. Not only does the devil get all the best lines, but he bosses the show from beginning to end. Clad in feathered hat, long curly wig and reminiscent of the Laughing Cavalier, René Pape plays Mephistopheles quite superbly, alternating between mercurial bouffe comic lines and extreme sardonic nastiness. His voice was smooth and controlled and his whole presence radiated command.
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| 12-Sep-2011 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Pappano's Trittico makes a storming season opener | David Karlin |
 BILL COOPER.jpg) Murder. Suicide. Grand larceny. Puccini's triptych of short operas, two tragedies followed by a riotous farce, always makes for an evening of variety, with the potential for many snatches of greatness. Antonio Pappano is a fan - he recorded Il Trittico with the LSO in 1998, and featured Gianni Schicchi in his BBC series on Italian opera - and undoubtedly had a large hand in its being chosen to open the Royal Opera's 2011-12 season.Read full review... | ||
| 17-Jul-2011 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | An all-star cast create opera history in the Royal Opera House's Tosca | Laura Kate Wilson |
 Ever since the Royal Opera House announced that two performances of its summer revival of Jonathan Kent's production of Tosca would feature an all-star cast, opera lovers all over the world have been desperately trying to get their hands on a golden ticket.
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| 11-Jul-2011 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Laurent Pelly's story book Cendrillon | David Karlin |
 PIERARD AS NOEMIE, RUUTEL AS DOROTHEE, PODLES AS MADAME DE LA HALTIERE, (FRONT) DIDONATO AS CENDRILLON (C) COOPER 2011.jpg) I once heard a lecture by Gérard Mortier, then head of the Paris Opera, contrasting the twin operatic traditions starting from Monteverdi's serious and affecting dramma per musica and the lavish court entertainments of Lully. A couple of centuries on, there's no need to ask the side of the fence on which Massenet's Cendrillon falls.Read full review... | ||
| 25-Jun-2011 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Madama Butterfly | Intermezzo |
 HOBAN-ROH-sq.jpg) What makes this otherwise routine revival of Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser’s eight year old production an absolute must-see is the sensational Royal Opera House debut of Kristine Opolais in the title role. She is a statuesque Latvian blonde, barely transformed by her dark wig and geisha makeup. Yet she convinces utterly as the fifteen year old Japanese bride bought by an American naval officer then cruelly abandoned.
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| 21-Jun-2011 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Andrew Davis conducts a powerful telling of Britten's Peter Grimes | David Karlin |
 HEPPNER AS PETER GRIMES, COPPLESTONE AS JOHN (C) BARDA 2011.jpg) English classical music is often associated with the countryside, the landscape and its villages, and Britten's opera Peter Grimes is no exception. But this isn't the gentle, pastoral landscape of Brooke or Housman, and no larks are ascending here: it's a harsh, forbidding place inhabited by harsh, forbidding people whose Christianity has much faith and some hope but a distinct shortage of charity.Read full review... | ||
| 24-May-2011 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Macbeth at the Royal Opera | David Karlin |
 BARDA 2011-1.jpg) Ukranian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska made a sensational Royal Opera debut earlier this season, as a late substitute for the title role of Aida. In the revival of Phyllida Lloyd's production of Verdi's Macbeth, she produced an equally commanding performance.Read full review... | ||
| 5-May-2011 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Villazón returns to form in the Royal Opera's Werther | David Karlin |
 ASHMORE 2011.jpg) Boy falls in love with girl. Girl marries another man. Boy kills himself. The plot of Massenet's Werther isn't exactly complex or taxing, but then, in all great stories, it's the way you tell them that counts.
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| 14-Apr-2011 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Not that sort of Royal Wedding | David Karlin |
 POPLAVSKAYA AS MARFA, BURCHULADZE AS SOBAKIN, REUTER AS GRYAZNOY, VINOGRADOV AS MALYUTA-SKURATOV (C) BILL COOPER 2011.jpg) The message in Paul Curran's new production of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tsar's Bride is a simple one: violent and powerful men are the same in every era. And, of course, no good can result from the violence. If the opera's title made you expect a happy and light-hearted occasion, think again: it's definitely not that sort of Royal Wedding.
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| 30-Mar-2011 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Power and control in the Royal Opera's Aida | David Karlin |
COOPER.jpg) Attendees of last night's Aida may have been concerned that they would be seeing a stand-in soprano, with the Ukranian Liudmyla Monastyrska making her Covent Garden debut. They needn't have worried. Monastyrska gave a world class performance with great vocal control and huge power. Her cry of Ritorna vincitor!, enjoining the hero Radamès to return victorious, nearly blew the roof off the Royal Opera House - and I can say this safely, since I was fairly close to the roof in an amphitheatre seat.Read full review... | ||
| 29-Mar-2011 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Fidelio at the Royal Opera | David Karlin |
 Fidelio, Beethoven's only opera, is on the most universal of themes: the oppression of the innocent by the powerful and the virtue of the struggle for a loved one. It could be set at any time in any place, from Ancient Rome or China to our modern world. Jürgen Flimm's 2007 production, revived for Covent Garden, is timeless and placeless: only the weapons and costumes mark it in modern times, with a hint of "fall of Saddam Hussein" when workmen dismantle Don Pizarro's equestrian statue at the end, but we could be in any military prison anywhere in the world.
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| 4-Mar-2011 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Anna Nicole | David Karlin |
COOPER.jpg) In case you've somehow missed the hype, Anna Nicole is the Royal Opera's newly commissioned opera about the life of Anna Nicole Smith, a girl from Texas who married an elderly billionnaire, became a model and celebrity sex symbol who received gigantic media exposure, and died of a drug overdose a few months after the death of her son. It's Mark-Anthony Turnage's third major opera, and the first that he has written with librettist Richard Thomas. The salacious material of the story ‐ sex, drugs and celebrity abound ‐ has attracted an extraordinary media blitz.Read full review... | ||
| 1-Feb-2011 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Sir Colin Davis conducts a masterful Magic Flute at Covent Garden | David Karlin |
HOBAN.jpg) I've commented before about Die Zauberflöte that if you get the music right, the rest will follow. In the first night of the Royal Opera's latest revival of David MacVicar's 2003 production, Sir Colin Davis definitely got the music right. We were distracted at the start of the overture by Tamino entering through a doorway in the curtain and by mysterious people high in the audience holding globe-shaped lights. But these disappeared after the first few bars, leaving us to listen to the music, at which point I soon realised that we were in for a real orchestral treat.
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| 18-Jan-2011 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Aleksandra Kurzak shines as Rossini's Rosina | David Karlin |
HOBAN.jpg) Rossini's The Barber of Seville has been his most enduringly well-loved opera. It's in the top ten of operas performed worldwide today, and it has stayed at the top of the most-played lists even when many of his other works were little played. This isn't an accident: it's an easy-going romantic comedy which doesn't demand much and leaves you feeling good and humming the tunes - most particularly, Figaro's bombastic, fast-talking Largo al factotum, which has to be one of the greatest theatrical entrances ever.
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| 30-Dec-2010 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Bychkov and Botha do Tannhäuser | David Karlin |
 My last opera of the year was also my first Wagner: a new Covent Garden production of Tannhäuser, directed by Tim Albery and conducted by Semyon Bychkov.
First things first: Bychkov was magnificent. His phrasing wowed me time after time, the dynamics and matching of the music to the action were impeccable, and some glorious textures came from the orchestra in passages of all sorts, particuarly in Wagner's trademark brass writing. In just under four hours of music, there was hardly a foot wrong and never a dull moment.
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| 29-Dec-2010 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Hurrah! The Witch is Dead! | Hilary Fisher |
 This reviewer fully expected not to enjoy today’s matinee, having read the recent Guardian review and heard mixed reports from friends who saw it when it first came out. Apart from a couple of minor quibbles – why doesn’t the mother knock the milk jug over as indicated in the score? And why when Hansel is stuck under the Witch’s kitchen unit does his foot appears in one drawer unbelievably far away from his finger which appears in another drawer – was this supposed to be funny?Read full review... | ||
| 18-Nov-2010 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur at the Royal Opera | David Karlin |
ASHMORE.jpg) Giacomo Puccini comprehensively eclipsed the other Italian composers of his era. Three of them remain in the repertoire as one hit wonders: Mascagni, Leoncavallo and Francesco Cilea, whose four act Adriana Lecouvreur opened at Covent Garden last night. It's the story of a love triangle which ends in murder, set backstage at the Comédie Française in the 18th century and based on a true story (or at least, on a story that was widely believed at the time): the real Adrienne Lecouvreur died in 1730, probably poisoned by her rival, the Princesse de Bouillon.
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| 26-Oct-2010 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Gounod's Roméo et Juliette at Covent Garden | David Karlin |
 COOPER.jpg) Gounod's Roméo et Juliette isn't exactly a rarity, but it is no longer one of the stalwarts of the opera repertoire, a position which it certainly occupied during the Victorian era (there were 102 performances at the Théâtre-Lyrique in Paris in the first year of its life, followed by 291 performances at the Opéra-Comique in the next twenty). The Royal Opera's present production dates back to 1994, and is being revived for just the second time.
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| 16-Oct-2010 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Rigoletto at Covent Garden - Gavanelli and McVicar ride again | David Karlin |
CLIVE BARDA.jpg) Rigoletto is what an opera promoter might describe as a "banker": it's a safe bet to get those seats filled and keep the audience happy. There's a rare blend of gorgeously beautiful music allied to darkly nasty drama that gives the opera enormous, continuing appeal. David McVicar's production is clearly considered a banker by the Royal Opera - we're now on its fifth revival in the nine years since its first outing in 2001 - and last night won't have disappointed them, with not an empty seat in the house and hardly a returned ticket available.
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| 25-Sep-2010 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Steffani's Niobe, Regina di Tebe at Covent Garden | David Karlin |
 In 2008, conductor Thomas Hengelbrock rediscovered Niobe, Regina di Tebe, written in 1687 by the Venetian-born, German-based composer Agostino Steffani. Although now little remembered, Steffani was a world-famous composer in his day and a man of many talents who became a diplomat and bishop as well as being a musician. Hengelbrock and director Lukas Hemleb staged Niobe at the Schwetzingen Festival, and they have adapted this production for the Royal Opera House and the Grand Théâtre du Luxembourg.
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| 6-Jul-2010 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Angela Denoke sings Salome at Covent Garden | David Karlin |
BARDA.jpg) Over a hundred years after its première, Richard Strauss's opera Salome retains its ability to shock. The opera was adapted from Oscar Wilde's retelling of the biblical tale, in which Herod's daughter demands and receives the head of the prophet Jokanaan (John the Baptist) on a silver charger. The details of the original tale are scanty, both in the bible and in Josephus: in Wilde's conceit, Salome starts as a young innocent and is then gripped by obsession.Read full review... | ||
| 1-Jun-2010 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Natalie Dessay sings Donizetti's La Fille du Régiment | David Karlin |
COOPER.jpg) Natalie Dessay has been making a real signature role out of Marie, Donizetti's foundling "Daughter of the Regiment" who turns out to be of noble birth (well, partly, wherein lies the tale). We went to Covent Garden last night specially to see her, and she didn't disappoint: her performance was quite out of the ordinary.
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