Some people get terribly, passionately serious about Wagner. This shouldn’t be a problem: truly great music of all kinds tends to attract obsessive adulation, especially whenever the artist is a…
“A Ring Cycle set in a launderette? Well, I’ve seen weirder productions…” Unexpected Opera’s approachable and slick reduction of Wagner’s epic starts on a characteristically unstuffy note, and proceeds to…
It’s hard to get more hipster than an immersive opera installation in an abandoned house in Peckham. workshOPERA’s Seven Velvet Suits is part of BasicSpace, a new arts festival offering six…
Glyndebourne’s short opera from Luke Styles sets Macbeth in a modern British army unit deployed, judging by their desert fatigues, somewhere in the Middle East East (so, feel free to…
The topic of Ergo Phizmiz’s small opera Gala is Gala Dalí’s overwhelming passion for Jeff Fenholt, the original star of Jesus Christ Superstar, who was a ‘boy toy’ for Gala when she…
Directed with witty skill by Bill Bankes-Jones, Tête à Tête’s Artistic Founder and Director, these two imaginative and appealing short operas made for an enchanting hour at Kings Place. Reducing…
We don’t laugh at oddities of nature in circus sideshows any more: sadly, we haven’t grown out of the propensity, but it’s simply become all too easy (and, for some,…
An hour of effervescent creative and musical brilliance which enthralls adults and children alike, Thousand Furs tells the old European folktale of Allerleirauh: one of the earliest, and darkest, versions of…
In the mixed bag that is Tête à Tête, you always get at least one well-intentioned flop. they heavily vanish is a prime example. The title is an excerpt from…
Composer Tim Benjamin gives us a masterclass in how to create a one-handed opera twice over in his Life Stories. Rest in Peace, inspired by a short story from Chekhov (Life…