Harry Fehr’s New Production of The Elixir of Love at the London Coliseum

Der Rosenkavalier is an opera about the passing of time and the need to let go. It’s a particularly appropriate, then, that the current Metropolitan Opera production marks goodbyes for two singers. Superstar soprano Renée Fleming is leaving the opera stage (though she will continue to perform in concerts and on Broadway), while mezzo-soprano Elina Garança has announced her intention to give up trouser roles (including, of course, Octavian). Elina will be very much...

Operas are frequently derided for their weak plots. Many are based on melodramatic plays or novels that were once popular but have failed to stand the test of time. Franco Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac is a welcome exception. Alfano’s opera lacks musical originality, but it has both depth of emotion and great respect for Rostand’s theatrical masterpiece. It helps that Henri Cain’s libretto is more or less a shortened version of the play. While speeches and...

All Wagner should sound this glorious. Der Fliegende Holländer is the work of a young Wagner still finding his distinctive voice and style. But it has the (rare) merit of brevity, which allows the best performers to attack it with unstinting energy. At the Metropolitan Opera, under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, it is taut and thrilling music drama. From the first moments, the brass section played with an energy that swept me away. Nézet-Séguin...

Philipp Stolzl, the stage director of the Der fliegende Holländer’s version that is being performed at Liceu, states in the programme (quoted by Brigitte Heusinger): “We tell it (the story of the Dutchman)from the perspective of Senta… and we draw the psychograma of a woman that escaped into the world of legend and fantasy and does not manage to come back from it. Now, years later, Senta is a disoriented girl in the body of an adult woman”. The idea of...

Italian contemporary composer Salvatore Sciarrino, born in 1947, defined his monodrama Lohengrin as "azione invisibile per solista, strumenti e voci". He expected his work to be an invisible action so to say not to be staged and only presented by a small orchestra dominated by winds, a soprano and three male singers. The new installation of this work by the Salzburg Easter Festival is enriched as a Prelude by two other compositions of Salvatore Sciarrino. La Spazia Inversa,...

Thomas Adès’ The Exterminating Angel, which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2016, is based on Luis Buñuel’s classic 1962 Surrealist film. In it a group of bourgeois guests dine at the house of Edmundo, Marqués de Nobile, and his wife Lucia, only to discover that at the end of the evening that they are unable to leave the house. An undefined force is holding them in one room, and as the days wear on the people stuck there grow increasingly bestial as...