First Rate Revival of Andrei Serban’s Turandot at the Royal Ballet and Opera, Covent Garden

Shostakovich’s final opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, has had a rocky history. It was a smash hit when first performed in 1934, but it was officially condemned by the Communist Party two years later for its sympathetic portrayal of a triple murderess. Nowadays, it hovers on the fringes of the standard repertoire (barely making it into Operabase’s 100 most-performed works globally last season). It’s exciting to see it newly staged at the Salzburg Festival this...

In Peter Sellars’ new production of La clemenza di Tito, whenever Sesto says “traditor” (“traitor”) in his end-of-act-one recitativo accompagnato, the supertitles read “terrorist”. This may seem like a small detail, but it’s emblematic of Sellars’ and Currentzis’s audacious reworking of Mozart’s opera. Sesto’s treason is personal, a crime against his friend and father figure Tito. Terrorism is general—the...

The Munich opera festival has developed to one of the leading opera festivals without making a big press about it. Every year in July the Bavarian State Opera presents a program consisting of a selection of the last season new productions, as well as major remakes, as well as new productions and accompanying contemporary music evenings. Two big open air spectacles enrich the voluminous program. Major attractions are the casts. Every evening represents a chance to hear the best singers on...

Yet another title from Verdi’s “popular trilogy” at Liceu. We had Rigoletto in March and now, to close the season, Il Trovatore. Betting repeatedlyfor the most popular operas can be dangerous: whilst it is true that they bring with them a full house, they also generate disproportionate expectations in an audience that know them (of thinks to know them) by heart and who wish – often in vain – to listen on stage to the results that tend to belongmore to the...

Based on a play by Jean Racine, Mitridate, re di Ponto is an early Mozart opera that premiered in December 1770. The musicologist Daniel E. Freeman recently demonstrated that Mozart incorporated some musical motives from Josef Mysliveček’s La Nitteti, which was first performed in April 1770 just a month after the young Amadeus first met the older composer, into his own operatic setting. Nevertheless, this hardly detracts from the achievement of a fourteen-year old composing such an...

Like the Shakespeare play upon which it is based, Giuseppe Verdi’s penultimate opera Otello of 1887 is the story of a general in the Venetian military whose skills in managing political and personal affairs do not match those he has demonstrated in fighting. When his ‘friend’ Iago feels Otello has sidelined him for promotion, he lays a trap to make Otello believe his wife Desdemona has been unfaithful, and the general falls whole-heartedly for the deception with...