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

Based on the Sophocles tragedy, Richard Strauss’s Elektra of 1909 represents the first of his several collaborations with librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who in this instance had already written an eponymous play. It is the second of Strauss’s two highly modernist operas, and deploys dissonance, chromaticism and extremely fluid tonality to an even greater degree than his first, Salome.  The opera is expressionistic in every sense since the adaptation of the...

The Liceu has opened the year with a revival that is also a birthday party. In 1999, the Peralada Festival commissioned Calixto Bieito to stage direct a new production of Carmen. In 2010 and 2015 this Carmen, which has travelled to more than 70 theatres around the world, could be seen at Liceu. Now, on the 25th anniversary of the premiere, it has returned once again to the Barcelona stage. Carmen was the title that placed Bieito's name in the international panorama of opera...

Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, with a libretto by his sister Adelheid Wette, is based on the eponymous fairytale that was recorded by the Brothers Grimm and published in 1812. It follows the Grimm version of the story reasonably closely, although there are a few notable differences including the fact that the Mother here is not intent on losing the children in the forest so that she and her husband might survive the hard times. She sends them there to collect berries as a...

For an opera production, 25 years is an almost venerable age. Few manage to reach it. On the eve of the year in which the centenary of Puccini's death will be commemorated on the one hand, and on the other, the 25th anniversary of the reopening of the theatre after the fire that destroyed it in 1994, the Liceu has once again revived the production of Turandot with which it reopened in 1999 and which had already been remade in 2005 and 2009. Ezio Frigerio (deceased in 2022) designed...

Composed in 1751, Handel’s Jephtha is based on the story from Judges XI and George Buchanan’s 1554 play Jephthes, sive Votum. It sees the Israelite Jephtha triumph in battle over the Ammonites, but then face the most dreadful situation. This is because he had vowed that if he were victorious he would sacrifice the first living creature he saw on his return, and this turns out to be his daughter Iphis. To make the work acceptable to an eighteenth century audience,...

7 Deaths of Maria Callas is a multi-disciplinary affair as it combines opera, live and performance art and video projections. It is the brainchild of Marina Abramović, who is known as the mother of performance art, and is currently enjoying a retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts. Abramović has always felt an affinity with Maria Callas, and the suffering caused by disillusionment and dramatic love affairs that lies at the heart of many of her own works finds its...