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…
Tête-à-Tête is branching out ever further into new venues. Having been to a dance theatre and a nightclub, we now found ourselves in a school theatre. Fittingly, the evening’s programme…
Although the first piece (One Day This Will be Long Ago) was difficult and the second (China Doll) plain agony to sit through, the Tête-à-Tête Clubnight at Egg, London finished with…
I have to start this review with a confession: the more you go to Unexpected Opera shows, the harder it gets to remain objective about them. As I’ve now seen…
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…
Puccini’s great crowd-pleaser La bohème is more than familiar to audiences all over the world, but this tale of poverty-stricken love and death remains a compelling watch, whether you are…
From the opening party at Magda’s house, all fairylights and champagne, to the sultry Paris dive where students are later discovered toasting new-found love in absinthe, La rondine is no “poor…
Oksana Dyka sang at the 2005 inauguration of President Viktor Yushchenko (or so Wikipedia confidently assures me). Only two months afterwards, she would star in her very first Tosca. Nine years…
“The windmill goes round and round… It is a simple life”. The Miller‘s Wife opens, and almost closes, with a similar scene: the miller’s wife in the garden of the mill, while…