Rossini
Florid flummery
Lightning sometimes strikes twice. English Touring Opera hit topical gold last spring when, wholly by coincidence, they found themselves touring…
Carry on Bel Canto
Melons. An absolutely cracking pair of melons, right there on a platter: the centrepiece of the banquet that the chaste,…
Tsar quality
There are worse inconveniences than having to wear a face mask to the opera. But there’s one consequence that hadn’t…
Musically superb but there isn’t a moment where one feels for anyone: Semiramide reviewed
The late arch-Rossinian Philip Gossett regarded Semiramide as a neoclassical work, vaguely and alarmingly suggesting to me a musical equivalent…
Not a pretty sight
‘Forget Downton Abbey!’ exhorts David Pountney in the programme for Figaro Forever, Welsh National Opera’s season of Beaumarchais operas, The…
Show and Tell
There’s no such thing as a tasteful rape scene — or there certainly shouldn’t be. It’s an act of grossest…
Off colour
Big slats of orange, burning yellows, an Adriatic in electric blue: I wish I’d bought my sunglasses to the Royal…
Talent show
La Donna del Lago, based on a poem by Sir Walter Scott, is one of the nine serious, dramatic operas…
Golden hearted
Puccini’s La fanciulla del West is, one suspects, one of those works that modern audiences struggle to keep a straight…
Robo-Tell
Is there a fundamental, insuperable problem with staging Rossini’s Guillaume Tell on a budget, without the resources to conjure up…
Bad night for Berlioz
I wonder whether grand opéra really takes war as seriously as this year’s Edinburgh Festival wanted it to. These vast…
Dark night of the soul
Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites is an audacious work, much more so than many others that advertise their audacity. It deals…
