Aigul Akhmetshina Dazzles in Carmen Once More at the Royal Ballet and Opera, Covent Garden

Based on Prosper Mérimée’s eponymous novella, Georges Bizet’s Carmen of 1875, with a libretto by Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac, is the story of the ultimate temptress. A gypsy and cigarette factory worker in Seville, Carmen has the power to entice any man she chooses. Once, however, they are besotted with her she quickly moves on, leaving them heart broken and unable to accept what has happened. In the opera Don José, an army corporal,...

Turandot, with a libretto by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni, is Giacomo Puccini’s final opera. It was left unfinished at the time of his death in 1924, and posthumously completed by Franco Alfano before premiering at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala in 1926. There have subsequently been other completions of the score, most notably by Luciano Berio in 2001, but the Alfano version remains the most frequently performed, and is the one used in this instance.  Set in Peking in...

Thomas Mann, in one of the most famous cases of audio-visual synaesthesia, stated in a letter to visual artist Emil Pretorius that Lohengrin’s sound is ‘silvery blue’. It may be so. Josep Pons, the great triumph of the premiere night achieved Lohengrin’s beautiful silvery blue sound. Pons, the principal conductor at Liceu’s Orchestra since 2012, achieved with this Lohengrin one of the best performances of the orchestra in the last few seasons. The ensemble...

Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore of 1853, with a libretto by Salvadore Cammarano and Leone Emanuele Bardare, is based on Antonio García Gutiérrez’s Spanish play El trovador of 1836. Set in fifteenth century Spain it tells of the noble lady Leonora who is in love with the troubadour Manrico, but is herself loved by the Count di Luna, a nobleman in the service of the Prince of Aragon. The Count’s younger brother Garzia supposedly died in infancy when a...

Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 film Festen (The Celebration) is a black comedy in which the emphasis should arguably be on the word ‘black’ rather than ‘comedy’. Now, Mark-Anthony Turnage has adapted it into an opera, varying the original story in places. Set in 1989 in a hotel in the Danish countryside, run by Helge and Else Klingefeldt, it sees a gathering to celebrate Helge’s sixtieth birthday. Many friends and family members are in attendance...

Mary, Queen of Scots, a commission by Scottish Opera that premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1977, is the first of Thea Musgrave’s four operas on historical figures. It is also the first for which she wrote her own libretto, with her starting point being an unpublished play by Amalia Elguera, who had previously written the libretto for Musgrave’s 1973 opera The Voice of Ariadne.  While there have been plays and operas about the character before, the majority have...