Opera and physics: as a combination, what could possibly go wrong? As I briefly scanned one of the many programme notes generously supplied for the brave audience of Entanglement! An Entropic Tale, entitled “Quantum Mechanics, Shroedinger, The Uncertainty Principle and Wave-Particle Duality”, I felt a sense of mounting panic. However, as experiments go, Entanglement! wasn’t…
Lucia di Lammermoor is an opera of shocking brutality, with savage emotional aggression rivalling physical violence throughout its fast-paced plot. Fulham Opera’s reduction for Grimeborn brings Donizetti’s dark, doomed characters to vivid life with some glorious principal singers, supported by a dramatic piano accompaniment from Ben Woodward. Foremost is Alberto Sousa’s passionate, difficult Edgardo, a…
Taking as its inspiration Lorca’s 1928 play Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín, Edward Lambert’s The Cloak and Dagger Affair is a curious portrait of a very odd marriage. The aged Don Perlimplín has just taken on the sizzlingly erotic young Belisa as a wife; she has already been unfaithful, but her…
“And in a world where everyone else is in possession of at least once significant other, I couldn’t be more alone.” Elfyn Jones’ timely little one-woman opera Vicky and Albert taps directly into modern loneliness with an unerring eye for detail and lashings of deliciously bitter humour. There are no Victorian monarchs: Vicky is a…
Prometheus stole fire from the gods in order to ensure human progress, and met with a grisly eternal punishment as a reward: Zeus’ eagle devouring his liver daily. Keith Burstein’s new opera The Prometheus Revolution attempts to engage with this Greek myth through a story of modern-day capitalism and revolt. Peter (Alex Haigh) redirects two trillion pounds…
The celebrations of the centenary of Women’s Suffrage in Britain have reached Dalston’s cultural heartland as Spectra Ensemble present a little-known opera by Suffragette composer Ethel Smyth, The Boatswain’s Mate, at Grimeborn. Smyth had to fight hard to become a composer, and even harder to get her work on stage, but she won through on both counts,…
Madame Butterfly enjoys extraordinary popularity today: even people who have never been to an opera in their lives could probably recognise its title. But why? Despite its surface familiarity, it’s a dark, upsetting piece, entirely devoid of romance, brimful of callous manipulation. Above all, its score is a far more challenging, experimental listen than we…
The little-known Cendrillon of Franco-Maltese composer Nicolò Isouard is the opera on which Rossini based his blockbuster hit La Cenerentola, which swiftly pitched Isouard’s Cendrillon into obscurity. On the opening night, possibly the opera’s UK première, the rain poured unhelpfully down on Bampton’s exquisite Deanery Garden, but spontaneous umbrella jokes (rhyming nicely with ‘Cinderella’) were…
Barrie Kosky’s vividly abstract production of Saul for Glyndebourne embraces every emotional detail of this dramatic oratorio, from its exhilarating choruses to its raw, intimate family scenes. Kosky adds voices beyond Handel’s music: we hear laughs, shouts, cries, sobs, sighs, gasps, even spoken words around and between the score, fleshing out each moment with human detail.…
Should divine visions of philosophical beauty be cut short by practical things like food or fireworks? Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos is an opera of two worlds in collision, and Anthony Negus, conducting the Longborough Orchestra, worked the score’s lightning moodswings and dreamily re-echoed themes into a glittering, believable whole. Stunning central performances by Clare Presland,…