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…
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…
Fulham Opera, noted in recent years for their serious and compelling Wagner and Verdi output, are also not shy of comedy (as demonstrated by their very successful Falstaff). Die Fledermaus is a revenge comedy in the lighter tradition of operetta, and Fulham Opera’s take on Strauss is characteristically skilful, immediate, and musically polished, with minimal…
Sung with glorious musicality by a fine cast, there is no better chance to get really close to this extraordinary work than Fulham Opera’s clear, dynamic production. Director Fiona Williams’ 1980s gangster setting suits the power-mongering plot well: in sharp suits and shellsuits, with glittering watches and flick knives, the rival political gangs huddle on the…
Wagner declared in his 1851 pamphlet Communication to my Friends that “the Flying Dutchman… gives emotionally compelling expression to… the longing for peace from the storms of life.” And Daisy Evans takes this sense of exhausted, eternal displacement as her directoral cue: it is our sudden, imposed rootlessness which puts us all at sea with the Dutchman, lost in…
First, darkness; next, grief and spiritual transcendence; finally, ribald laughter. For his penultimate work, Puccini designed a trio of short one-act operas, Il Trittico, to take his audience on an extraordinary, disconnected emotional journey in one evening, from a bitter revenge tragedy to a brilliant farce. Fulham Opera have picked the two most popular elements…
Fulham Opera’s Falstaff opens in a modern day pub: crisps are on the table, children are playing with mobile phones, and Falstaff himself is in tracksuit bottoms. It’s effectively a case of Verdi meets The Queen Vic, soaked in a London underworld atmosphere of wideboys, semi-functional alcoholics and glossy Essex beauties. Directed by Daisy Evans, the action…
Fulham Opera’s production is an act of distillation which rebels against everything we’re usually told about the Ring: and it allows the vibrant power of Wagner’s story, and the sheer beauty of his music for the human voice, to hit us harder and deeper than any production I have seen before. It is simply staged, brilliantly sung,…
Stripped back, bare, minimalist: not epithets you’d automatically apply to Wagner, the man who expects you to give over four days of your life to him every time you experience Der Ring des Nibelungen, and the composer whose orchestra is so huge that opera houses all over the world have to remove seats to accommodate it.…