by Tom Sutcliffe | Jun 12, 2019 | Music
Misfire The Hunting Gun by Yasushi Inoue, a great Japanese 20th-century author, is a complex, subtle tale involving three women, sexual betrayal by one of them with the husband of another, a daughter’s viewpoint, and the adulteress’s suicide. We get diverse...
by Tom Sutcliffe | May 28, 2019 | Music
Byway to hell All Berlioz’s few operas are highly original in structure and intention – a characteristic encouraged by this brilliant composer’s obsession with Shakespeare as a model alien in French culture. But his Damnation de Faust is not an opera, more like...
by Tom Sutcliffe | Apr 25, 2019 | Music
Billy Budd is Britten’s second opera for his beloved tenor partner, and the Royal Opera got one thing right for this somewhat dubious new production by Deborah Warner: namely Toby Spence in Peter Pears’s role, Edward Fairfax Vere, captain of HMS Indomitable....
by Tom Sutcliffe | Mar 22, 2019 | Music
Misfortune cookies The Royal Opera has sold this production expensively and successfully not because of the work itself, however interesting (and it really is), but because of Anna Netrebko and Jonas Kaufmann as Leonora and Alvaro. Nobody likes Christof Loy’s muddled...
by Tom Sutcliffe | Mar 3, 2019 | Music
PISS POOR Franz Lehár’s operetta, newly staged at the Coliseum by English National Opera, looks sort of traditionally Edwardian – except for the slinky contemporary ballgown worn by Sarah Tynan in the title role of Hanna Glawari, as up-to-the-minute as the MeToo...
