by Alexandra Coghlan | Feb 7, 2020 | Music
Gerald Barry’s Alice opera is less an adaptation than an invasion. The Irish composer takes Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Alice Through the Looking Glass and unleashes the full force of his madcap, surrealist imagination at them.... 
by Alexandra Coghlan | Dec 15, 2018 | Music
Now brush your teeth The Royal Opera’s brief to director Antony McDonald was simple: create a production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel that does for Christmas opera what The Nutcracker does for ballet. His answer is picture-postcard pretty – a nineteenth-century,... 
by Alexandra Coghlan | Nov 6, 2018 | Music
Shadow play Almost exactly a year ago OperaGlass Works brought Stravinsky’s 1951, Hogarth-inspired opera to Wilton’s Music Hall – a setting so pungent with resonance that all the company had to do was keep out of the way as the ultimate London opera came alive... 
by Alexandra Coghlan | Sep 26, 2018 | Music
Freia tonight Broken promises and uneasy alliances, cunning plans and cynical solutions, a played-out regime clinging to power while rivals snap hungrily at their heels: no wonder the Ring Cycle is the only time you ever see British politicians at the opera.... 
by Alexandra Coghlan | May 2, 2018 | Music
The Benny & Bjorn supremacy | By Alexandra Coghlan | In a genre of unlikely gambits – cats, nuns, the assassins of American presidents, a children’s train set – is there a less obvious subject for a musical than chess? There’s a certain wilful brilliance to... 