Tabla de contenidos para January 2023 en Opera Now

With the waters of Lake Michigan caressing the shoreline and the Chicago River snaking through the heart of the city proper, Chicago is best known for its iconic architecture. The city saw the invention of the skyscraper, and today the neo-Gothic Tribune Tower, the highly ornamented terracotta 1920s Wrigley Building, and mid-century modern Willis (Sears) Tower, among many other historic examples, are wedged between 21st-century modern steel, concrete, and glass skyscrapers of varying geometric sizes, shapes and heights. The USA’s third largest city – the Windy City, as it is called – offers a walkable and relatively peaceful downtown, shattered only by the occasional roar of the L, (its rapid transit system) as it barrels through the urban landscape on elevated tracks. This is where the US’s third largest opera…

Krzysztof Warlikowski is an inspirational, sometimes perverse and controversial, but always fascinating opera and theatre director. He is the founding artistic director of the Nowy Teatr in Warsaw and received the Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award at Teatro Biennale in Venice in 2021, for ‘being the advocate for a profound renewal of the European language of Theatre’. The award is an indication of what an erudite and deep-thinking human being he is. Warlikowski grew up in Poland under communism which ‘deprived me of oxygen,’ he says. and this has probably influenced his deeply concerned outlook on society and our world today – certainly not optimistic but neither pessimistic, as you might justifiably assume. He is, he says, simply ‘realistic’, convinced that our civilisation is in sharp decline and desperately eager…

Royal Opera House, London MUSIC ★★★★ STAGING ★★★ Alcina is one of Handel’s most gorgeous and intriguing creations: a strange marriage of interlocking love stories and absurdist fantasy, its characters beguiled and then betrayed by the powers of an enchanted island. It needs an evenly matched cast of singers to pull off, and a director who is playful without getting carried away. The Royal Opera assembled both. It is rare to hear a group of singers, all with major arias to project in each act, where the standards are so uniformly high. The most telling was Emily D’Angelo in the trouser role of Ruggiero, first lover then conqueror of the island’s sorceress Alcina. D’Angelo is still under 30 but has a voice of extraordinary character, musical intuition and all the…

Welsh National Opera, Cardiff MUSIC ★★★★★ STAGING ★★★ Migrations is musically superb, a modern opera that is thrilling to listen to if hard to grasp. It’s also a very good example of why a libretto should not be written by a committee. David Pountney came up with the idea for Will Todd’s new opera with an eye to the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower’s sailing. It should have been premiered two years ago in 2020 but Covid lockdowns intervened. In the meantime, the project grew into what Pountney calls a ‘collage of different stories’, all based on some aspect of migration, from the Pilgrim Fathers (who get a troublingly positive spin in this opera) to a flock of migrating birds played by dancing children with yellow beaks on their heads.…

The Metropolitan Opera, New York MUSIC ★★★★★ STAGING ★★★ The Met’s revival of John Doyle’s oppressively dark and dehumanisng production of Britten’s Peter Grimes is an overwhelming opera-going experience. This is despite the miscalculation of Doyle’s setting on Scott Pask’s black, wooden set. Some might argue that it adds to Britten’s and Montagu Slater’s infinitely gloomy tale of scapegoating, cruelty and mental illness in a small, narrowminded English fishing village. But it entirely omits a tavern, a hut, sea, sky, any hints of salt air – all of which are depicted in Britten’s music (and particularly in the Four Sea Interludes) and are crucial to the action and worldview of the work. The floor-toceiling monolithic set has windows at all heights that flap open to reveal the other characters ‘watching’…

Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris MUSIC ★★★★ STAGING ★★★★★ It is more than 20 years since director Laurent Pelly and conductor Mark Minkowski last collaborated on an Offenbach operetta. This time they are bringing out the darkness under the fun in La Périchole, with a 20th-century update of Offenbach’s tale of love and poverty in 18th-century Peru. We open with the Choeur de l’Opéra National de Bordeaux rhythmically bobbing up and down on benches outside a tenement in Lima, as they drink the visiting Viceroy’s health, bribed to do so by two courtiers, and plied with alcohol from a mobile stall by the exuberant trio of Chloé Briot, Alix Le Saux and Eléonore Pancrazi. In the background we see the mouth and nose of an enormous portrait of the Viceroy, a…

It all began with a dressing up box: in 2013, Hungarian State Opera launched an ambitious programme to introduce opera to teenagers, touring secondary schools with a chest full of the props from a production of Ferenc’s opera Hunyadi László. Over seven seasons, OperAdventure, by way of the Lázár Ervin programme, saw around 300,000 students being given free acess to 15 different operas and ballets at Hungarian State Opera’s Erkel Theatre – its ‘people’s stage’. Now OperAdventure is back, with the support of energy company MVM. A new production of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas was part of a schools initiative that integrated itself seamlessly into a season of opera with the theme ‘Myth and History’, celebrating both Hungarian State Opera’s return to its beautifully restored opera house, and the opening…

The top prize at the Voice of Black Opera Competition has been won by British soprano Rachel Duckett with a programme that included arias by Verdi and Richard Strauss. The competition was organised by the Black British Classical Foundation and held at Birmingham Town Hall on 5 December, with the five finalists accompanied by the orchestra of Welsh National Opera. Duckett won the Sir Willard White Trophy, an award of £10,000, repertoire coaching with music staff of Welsh National Opera, and a concert appearance with the WNO Orchestra. The South African tenor Thando Mjandana won the Samuel Coleridge Taylor Award of £5,000 plus three performances of a newly commissioned work by Daniel Kidane, for voice and ensemble, with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. He was chosen by the judges as…

The fate of Afghanistan and oppression of women are two phenomena that have acquired a topical urgency in today’s world. American composer Sheila Silver has been immersed in these subjects since 2009, when she first encountered Khaled Hosseini’s novel A Thousand Splendid Suns. She was struck by the overwhelming power of Hosseini’s narrative, which unfolds in Afghanistan between the 1960s and 2002. Above all, she sensed an operatic intensity in the bond that develops between the two protagonists, Mariam and Laila, as they struggle to cope in a milieu of abuse and domestic violence. The strength of that bond is what makes the shattering sacrifice at the opera’s climax possible. ‘I wanted to write this opera because the story of Mariam and Laila is larger than life,’ Silver told me.…

English National Opera, London MUSIC ★★★★ STAGING ★★★ It was not unreasonable to expect great things of ENO’s latest assault on G&S, now the company had finally got a director who actually knows how to do this repertoire: Jo Davies has made a great reputation at Opera North, and her Ruddigore and Kiss Me, Kate particularly were deliriously good shows. But alas, the ENO gremlin that has a grudge against the company’s attempts on operetta got its foot in the door, and the result was a show that was by no means dreadful, but gloomily flat and uninspired. And also, as ever seems to be the case, about half empty (Saturday night, fourth performance) – and with no handy excuse of transport strikes, either. The audience – catastrophically alienated by…

Scottish Opera, Edinburgh MUSIC ★★★★★ STAGING ★★★★★ Given the melange of ideas and influences that are threaded through Ainadamar, Osvaldo Golijov’s first, and so far only, opera, should not work so well as it does. But it is precisely his unconventional approach that makes it so fresh and compelling. In part this is because the Argentinian composer’s animated score is a constant around which other elements of the production can coalesce. The other is choreographer Deborah Colker’s impressive directorial debut with her sure-footed visceral approach that lets the music and dance set the production’s pulse. She was also supported by a crack design team headed by Jon Bausor. His striking set featured a circular curtain made up of long thin strands, like a veil of tears, which doubled as a…

Houston Grand Opera, Texas MUSIC ★★★★ STAGING ★★★★ The Wreckers has had a torturous history to be recognised as a work worthy of performance. The HGO, known to champion new and forgotten works, spurred on no doubt by the Me Too movement, became the first major American company to stage the opera. (Bard Summerscape staged the work in 2015.) Adapted by her married lover Henry Brewster from his French drama Les naufrageurs, The Wreckers was composed by Smyth at a time when patriarchal attitudes prevailed: no French nor English opera house would consider producing an opera by a woman. Finally, a heavily cut version in German called Standrecht was premiered in 1906 in Leipzig. The opera takes place in 18th-century Cornwall, rendered in Houston with detailed realism by British set…

Les Talens Lyriques at the Opera-Comique, Paris MUSIC ★★★★ STAGING ★★★★ ‘Ah, how wretched is the heart when abandoned by freedom.’ In the fantastical Syria ruled by Princess Armide, the choice weapon of conquest is seduction, not war. Her enchanting presence is too irresistible for a succession of invading crusaders who are ensnared by her magical powers. Then, as is so often the case with affairs of the heart, it all goes wrong. Along comes Renauld, the chivalrous knight, who turns the tables on Armide, freeing all her spellbound captives in a single stroke. Infatuated by this hero, and much to her consternation, she cannot bring herself to destroy the thing she loves, even if he is bound to be her nemesis. Christophe Rousset, director of Les Talens Lyriques, is…

Pene Pati, the young lyric tenor who hails from the Polynesian islands in the South Pacific, is on the threshold of a major international career. Following his debut at the San Francisco Opera in 2017, the San Francisco Chronicle described his voice as ‘having a lustrous middle, glorious top notes and producing a gleaming, sensuous stream of sound’. The past five years have seen him become a much sought-after artist, appearing in the world’s most prestigious opera houses and festivals: the Paris Opera, the Bolshoi in Moscow, the State Operas of Vienna and Berlin, the Teatro San Carlo and the Aix en Provence Festival. At the beginning of 2022, he also embarked on a solo recording career, having been signed by Warner Classics. His impressive debut solo album of Italian…

When David Lang was a student in the late 1970s, his first time seeing Fidelio on the stage left him pondering its contradictions. He listed some of them when we spoke: ‘Why is Rocco able to come off well, when he is complicit in imprisoning and killing prisoners? How is the threat of an evil oligarch solved when he is removed and replaced by the oligarch over him?’ And, most crucially, in view of the lofty cultural position Beethoven’s sole opera maintains as a beacon of humanist values of freedom and justice: ‘What happens to the other prisoners? Beethoven has created incredible sympathy for them as a class. Why do they just disappear until they’re magically freed at the end?’ These and other questions prompted Lang to create a new…

Irish National Opera, Dublin MUSIC ★★★★★ STAGING ★★★★★ Great opera, great performance. ENO’s troubles would probably never have happened if they had just bothered to do this kind of thing: their (much less wellfunded) Irish counterparts showed how, with confidence in the art-form and the audience, concentrating on the core of how operas work and what makes them good, a joy in execution and performance – and suddenly you saw how much effort is wasted in London on the fatuity of ‘challenging’ the public, the pretence of redressing social injustices, the mania for not-so-clever interventions in the solidgold pieces they perform, when doing the show is the only proper basis for success, and implies no sort of dereliction of musical and theatrical duty, as weve been browbeaten into accepting by…

After a late-summer break, the operatic leg of Ravenna’s annual arts festival kicked off with productions of three of Mozart’s best-known operas. Now in its 10th year, the Autumn Trilogy follows on from the city’s main celebration of music, theatre, dance and literature in June and July, with the spotlight firmly on opera. Mirroring the first Trilogy in 2012, which featured three Verdi classics – Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata, this year’s festival brought to Ravenna’s exquisite Teatro Alighieri the trio of Mozart operas with librettos by Lorenzo da Ponte: Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte. The stagings were all borrowed from Ivan Alexandre’s directorial package, originally created for Stockholm’s Drottingholm Palace Theatre and the Royal Opera, Versailles. The basic design, coupled with scenery and…

Opéra Royal/ Château de Versailles Spectacle MUSIC ★★★★★ STAGING ★★★★★ Dubbed a ‘biblical tragedy in five acts and a prologue’, David et Jonathas was first performed at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, a Jesuit school in Paris. The libretto, by Father François Bretonneau, is based on a story from the Old Testament. All that makes Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s work sound as if it might be a rather dry and high-minded spiritual treatise. Far from it! David et Jonathas is a vibrant tour-de-force of music theatre. Charpentier was no opera composer – though not due to any lack of talent. He was officially prevented from writing operas under the terms of the monopoly granted to Lully by Louis XIV (eventually retracted when relations with the King turned sour). However, Charpentier found ways through the…

Production Highlights • World Premieres • Exceptional Casts Performance runs starting in November and running through to December 2022. Listings are in alphabetical order by city within each country heading. M = Matinee performance. Comprehensive Worldwide Listings are available at www.operabase.com UNITED KINGDOM CARDIFF WELSH NATIONAL OPERA wno.org.uk Coming soon: WNO’s spring season will feature a new production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Also on the programme is a new touring production, Blaze of Glory!, which follows the fortunes of a small group of miners in the 1950s, who embark upon a musical escapade by reforming their Male Voice Choir to raise spirits following a mining disaster. EDINBURGH / GLASGOW SCOTTISH OPERA scottishopera.org.uk Coming soon: Scottish Opera will be presenting an Opera Highlights tour in February, featuring scenes and…