A Surreal Double Bill: Larmes de couteau and Full Moon in March at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

The Yeomen of the Guard of 1888 is one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s richest and darkest operettas. Set in the Tower of London in the sixteenth century, it sees one Colonel Fairfax face execution. The charge of sorcery, however, was the doing of his uncle who stands to inherit his estate if he dies unmarried. Fairfax plans to thwart his relative by marrying in the final hour of his life, and asks his friend Sir Richard Cholmondeley to find a suitable bride who will receive a large...

The story to be found in Handel’s Alcina of 1735 comes from Ludovico Ariosto’s epic sixteenth century poem Orlando furioso. This had already been employed by Francesca Caccini in La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina of 1625, which is recognised today as the first opera to be written by a woman. Handel himself used the libretto of L'isola di Alcina, an opera that was set in 1728 in Rome by Riccardo Broschi, which he acquired the...

Il Trovatore, the opera that is supposed to be performed in A night at the opera (1935), the immortal Marx brothers film, has always been called in modern - and not so modern - times a surviving opera in the repertoire thanks to its musical excellence despite its deliriously absurd and exaggerated plot. In this sense, its companions in the 'popular Verdian trilogy', Rigoletto and Traviata, benefit from supposedly higher quality arguments. That is not true, Il Trovatore,...

Staatsoper unter den Linden: A Götterdämmerung with emotions The Ring comes to an anti-climactic end. Thanks to the singers and orchestra, it is still an evening well worth attending. Having reached the last evening of the Ring der Nibelungen, audience members are always curious as to how a stage director tackles the grand collapse of society envisaged by Richard Wagner with the reurning of the Ring to the Rhine. How will stage director and designer Dmitri Tcherniakov handle...

Staatsoper unter den Linden: A Siegfried without passion Tcherniakov's direction presents a Siegfried without any romanticism or association to the libretto. But the music speaks a completely different language As in Rheingold and Walküre, in the third part of the Ring we still find ourselves in the E.S.C.H.E. Research Centre. That stands for Experimental Scientific Center for Human Evolution, so it has nothing to do with the eponymous ash tree in the opera. And...

Staatsoper unter den Linden: A Walküre without any allusions Gods are also just ordinary people in this lavish but stark production at the Staatsoper Berlin Consistently, director Dmitri Tcherniakov refuses to use any conventional props on the second evening of the new Ring der Nibelungen at the Staatsoper unter den Linden. As in Rheingold, we find ourselves in the E.S.C.H.E Research Centre - the Scientific Centre for Human Development. During the overture, a short news video...