Susan Bickley
A perfect antidote
Anyone familiar with Joe Hill-Gibbins’s work will brace instinctively when the curtain goes up on his new Figaro. He’s the…
One of the greatest operatic experiences of my life: Royal Opera’s Katya Kabanova reviewed
Janacek’s upsetting opera Katya Kabanova, which hasn’t been seen in the UK for some time, turned up in two different…
Excellent but there’s too much larking about: ENO’s Rodelinda reviewed
ENO has revived Richard Jones’s production of Handel’s Rodelinda. It was warmly greeted on its first outing in 2014, though…
The supremes
When I interviewed Richard Farnes in Leeds six years ago about Opera North’s project of performing the complete Ring, he…
Excess baggage
Near the end of Elena Langer’s new opera Figaro Gets a Divorce, as the Almaviva household — now emigrés in…
Lost in translation
About 15 minutes into act one of Jenufa, the student in the next seat leaned over to her companions and…
Falling down
This week, some 200 years since Goya’s ‘The Disasters of War’, almost 80 years after Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, and over 50…
Virtuoso Wagner
It seems a very short time since I interviewed Richard Farnes about Opera North’s planned Ring cycle, the dramas to…
