Latest news with #RoyalOpera
The Age
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘Radical creator' takes a ‘kaleidoscopic look at love' in Shakespeare-adjacent opera
'The scenarios that are presented in The Fairy Queen are a kind of kaleidoscopic look at love in every aspect,' she says. 'It's all about love and marriage, loss, sorrow, unrequited love – every possible angle. The universal experience of love.' Indeed, one of the opera's most affecting numbers begins with the line, 'If love's a sweet passion/why does it torment?' The libretto, thought to be by Thomas Betterton, is best described as Shakespeare-adjacent. No named characters from A Midsummer Night's Dream appear in it. Instead, we have personifications of the seasons, night and sleep, and fairies and green men. There's a comic scene for a rustic couple, Corydon and Mopsa, traditionally sung by bass and countertenor. 'What felt more interesting for me, for this production, was to allow The Fairy Queen to stand very much by itself,' Jones says. 'It's got a fantastic structure, it really works as a theatrical piece. Although it's a series of vignettes, they are structured together in a very clever way. Purcell was brilliant – he died when he was 36 – but he was such an interesting, curious, people-loving person. He was amazing.' British director Jones is known as an innovative theatre-maker who often incorporates video in her shows. Her recent production of Peter Grimes for Gothenburg Opera in Sweden was praised in The Observer for its devastating impact, and noted Jones as a 'radical creator who uses video to original effect'. She works with a team of designers and technicians at her creative studio, Lightmap. This is her first project with an Australian company, although in 2017 she brought her production of The Dark Mirror – a version of Schubert's Winterreise – with Ian Bostridge, to the Perth Festival. Pinchgut was lucky to secure Jones' services; last December she took up the newly created role of associate director of the Royal Opera. Jones has set this production of The Fairy Queen in a modern city that could be Sydney, with the action taking place across a 24-hour period. A wide video screen will reach across the back of the stage. 'The production will be very visual – there are lots of changes, lots of colour,' she says. 'The first production of The Fairy Queen almost bankrupted the theatre because they put everything in it. We can't do that but we can use the technology at our disposal to do something that's very visual. We've included dance and other elements of baroque theatre but we've just made it very contemporary.' Loading At the Royal Opera, Jones is charged with bringing in new commissions, new artists and new ways of addressing opera as an art form, working out of the Linbury Theatre. '[Opera] has been with us 300 years, it's not going away,' she says. 'It's an art form, not a medium. Media do tend to come and go – we may have something different to television in our domestic lives in the future. Whereas opera and painting and poetry and play-making, they are not the same. 'Companies have felt the squeeze but the work will live on and shift into something that is much more central to our cultural life. Sometimes when something is under threat you become more active in protecting it.' Purcell's music for The Fairy Queen was all but lost until its rediscovery in 1901. Growing interest in early music led to its revival. In 2003 the barely year-old Pinchgut Opera chose The Fairy Queen for its second production, after making its debut the previous year with Handel's Semele. Helyard says he has chosen to return to The Fairy Queen to show how far this small but musically rigorous company has come. 'Back then we weren't quite as stylistically confident with playing and singing this kind of music,' he says. 'This seemed like the perfect piece to go to the Ros Packer Theatre, our premiere there, and to revisit Purcell.' Back in the rehearsal room at the Drill Hall, the wedding party is in full swing. Mezzosoprano Anna Fraser rises from her seat, mock-drunkenly staggers to centre stage and begins to sing: 'Hark! How all things in one sound rejoice …' Almost on cue, rain starts to fall, like a thousand fairies drumming on the iron roof.
Sydney Morning Herald
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘Radical creator' takes a ‘kaleidoscopic look at love' in Shakespeare-adjacent opera
'The scenarios that are presented in The Fairy Queen are a kind of kaleidoscopic look at love in every aspect,' she says. 'It's all about love and marriage, loss, sorrow, unrequited love – every possible angle. The universal experience of love.' Indeed, one of the opera's most affecting numbers begins with the line, 'If love's a sweet passion/why does it torment?' The libretto, thought to be by Thomas Betterton, is best described as Shakespeare-adjacent. No named characters from A Midsummer Night's Dream appear in it. Instead, we have personifications of the seasons, night and sleep, and fairies and green men. There's a comic scene for a rustic couple, Corydon and Mopsa, traditionally sung by bass and countertenor. 'What felt more interesting for me, for this production, was to allow The Fairy Queen to stand very much by itself,' Jones says. 'It's got a fantastic structure, it really works as a theatrical piece. Although it's a series of vignettes, they are structured together in a very clever way. Purcell was brilliant – he died when he was 36 – but he was such an interesting, curious, people-loving person. He was amazing.' British director Jones is known as an innovative theatre-maker who often incorporates video in her shows. Her recent production of Peter Grimes for Gothenburg Opera in Sweden was praised in The Observer for its devastating impact, and noted Jones as a 'radical creator who uses video to original effect'. She works with a team of designers and technicians at her creative studio, Lightmap. This is her first project with an Australian company, although in 2017 she brought her production of The Dark Mirror – a version of Schubert's Winterreise – with Ian Bostridge, to the Perth Festival. Pinchgut was lucky to secure Jones' services; last December she took up the newly created role of associate director of the Royal Opera. Jones has set this production of The Fairy Queen in a modern city that could be Sydney, with the action taking place across a 24-hour period. A wide video screen will reach across the back of the stage. 'The production will be very visual – there are lots of changes, lots of colour,' she says. 'The first production of The Fairy Queen almost bankrupted the theatre because they put everything in it. We can't do that but we can use the technology at our disposal to do something that's very visual. We've included dance and other elements of baroque theatre but we've just made it very contemporary.' Loading At the Royal Opera, Jones is charged with bringing in new commissions, new artists and new ways of addressing opera as an art form, working out of the Linbury Theatre. '[Opera] has been with us 300 years, it's not going away,' she says. 'It's an art form, not a medium. Media do tend to come and go – we may have something different to television in our domestic lives in the future. Whereas opera and painting and poetry and play-making, they are not the same. 'Companies have felt the squeeze but the work will live on and shift into something that is much more central to our cultural life. Sometimes when something is under threat you become more active in protecting it.' Purcell's music for The Fairy Queen was all but lost until its rediscovery in 1901. Growing interest in early music led to its revival. In 2003 the barely year-old Pinchgut Opera chose The Fairy Queen for its second production, after making its debut the previous year with Handel's Semele. Helyard says he has chosen to return to The Fairy Queen to show how far this small but musically rigorous company has come. 'Back then we weren't quite as stylistically confident with playing and singing this kind of music,' he says. 'This seemed like the perfect piece to go to the Ros Packer Theatre, our premiere there, and to revisit Purcell.' Back in the rehearsal room at the Drill Hall, the wedding party is in full swing. Mezzosoprano Anna Fraser rises from her seat, mock-drunkenly staggers to centre stage and begins to sing: 'Hark! How all things in one sound rejoice …' Almost on cue, rain starts to fall, like a thousand fairies drumming on the iron roof.
Times
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Pimpinone review — Telemann's Royal Opera debut, 300 years later
The Royal Opera has taken a few centuries to stage an opera by Georg Philipp Telemann. With this production of Pimpinone, by the company's Jette Parker Artists at the Linbury Theatre, downstairs at the Royal Opera House, it's a case of one down, 34 to go. And that's just the number of Telemann operas for which manuscripts have survived. He probably wrote more than 50 in all. He really was a one-man factory of baroque music. It's just a pity he delivered quantity more than quality. That said, I'm not sure he is well served by Sophie Gilpin's staging of Pimpinone. Premiered 300 years ago as comic relief between the acts of Handel's tragic Tamerlano, it riffs on the classic Italian comedy
Telegraph
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Die Walküre: A bleak but brilliant vision of damaged nature and toxic relationships
One major advantage of unveiling a production of Wagner's Ring cycle year by year over four years is that you don't need to decide at the beginning how it will end. The director of the Royal Opera's new year-by-year staging, Barrie Kosky, has said that he does not know how this story will turn out by 2027: in this second instalment, his vision is an unvaryingly bleak and tortured picture of damaged nature and toxic relationships. As in the opening Das Rheingold, the scorched trees and gloomy landscapes of Rufus Didwiszus's sets create a compellingly bare, stripped-back scene of an earth destroyed. The wizened, aged, naked figure of Erda (Illona Linthwaite) observes continually: you feel she has seen it all before, covering her eyes in horror. She oversees interactions for both humans and gods in which we can believe: the awakening, forbidden love of Sieglinde and Siegmund; the fraught relationship between Wotan and his daughter Brünnhilde. There is not much to be gleaned from the first act's dreary blank wall of Sieglinde and Hunding's house, until the moment when the buried sword that Siegmund extracts reveals one of the production's ingenious twists. Solomon Howard's Hunding is a commanding figure (until Wotan dismisses him later with a Tosca-like backward flip), Natalya Romaniw's brightly sung Sieglinde a wife who screams in fear until she realises that Stanislas De Barbeyrac's ardent, lyrical Siegmund is her twin and her love. If this first act is slow to ignite, the second is totally compelling, starting from the crisp, strongly articulated Wotan of Christopher Maltman, whose argument with Marina Prudenskaya's imposing Fricka in purple, arriving in period limousine, is a power marriage all gone wrong. Elisabet Strid's youthful, tomboyish Brünnhilde starts as a rebellious child but quickly matures into an achingly independent adult in her heart-rending scene with her father in which their every fleeting emotion is captured in Kosky's direction. It was always to be expected that Kosky would want to delve into the constant problem of Wagner's anti-Semitism, and here the appearance in Act II of a charred body that is then viciously destroyed prepares the way for a shocking rethinking of the Ride of the Valkyries at the start of Act III, as they collect incinerated bodies, a sensation rescued theatrically only by the individual characterisations of the coven-like Valkyries. Vocally, this is a fascinating Walküre: all the singers, Maltman and Strid especially, but also Romaniw (who came in late to replace the more heavyweight talent Lise Davidsen), are comparatively youthful, fresh voices without a heavy inheritance of years of Wagner singing. The words are paramount, and their impulsiveness is matched by Antonio Pappano's conducting, which drives the music forward, sometimes feeling a little loose, but always effective in pushing the story forwards. Pappano is now Conductor Laureate at the house whose music he directed so effectively for 22 years. Who knows, perhaps a more optimistic vision of the future of humanity may emerge in the remaining instalments of this impressive, stimulating Ring cycle.
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Die Walküre review – Kosky's formidable staging is full of magic and menace
Four hours of music, and yet the most memorable figure in the Royal Opera's Die Walküre – the second instalment of company's new Ring cycle, directed by Barrie Kosky and conducted by Antonio Pappano – is silent. Just as in Das Rheingold, which opened here in September 2023, we are seeing events through the conduit of Erda, the ancient Earth Mother, who dreams this world into being as she slowly spins, naked, on a turntable at the front of the stage. It's no detriment to a singing cast that's very fine – and in the case of Natalya Romaniw's role debut as Sieglinde, outstanding – to say that this Erda, played by the actor Illona Linthwaite, is mesmerising. She's in every scene. She blesses the incestuous union of Siegmund and Sieglinde, strewing flowers like a figure from Botticelli's Spring. And when Fricka enters in a vintage car, all fur-coat and fury, who do you think is her chauffeur? It's almost as if Kosky is using Erda's physical presence to add to the network of musical themes used by Wagner to represent characters and ideas. But if Erda is a leitmotif, what does she represent? Perhaps Wotan's accountability; the world of mortals certainly isn't flourishing on his watch. And, if Rheingold was Erda's dream, Die Walküre starts off as her nightmare, with the orchestra creating a terrifying buzz in the prelude as Siegmund scrambles towards Sieglinde's door. Victoria Behr's costumes suggest a non-specific here and now, although Siegmund's blue top and yellow hoodie hint at Ukraine. Rufus Didwiszus's sets are dark and bleak: a wall of burnt planks for Sieglinde's house and, later, the felled World Ash Tree from Rheingold, which with the cast clambering through its holes and tunnels at times resembles a meerkat burrow. The almost feral Valkyries collect charred corpses which disintegrate into ash. Finally, every Walküre needs a good Magic Fire at the end, and this one doesn't disappoint. Kosky has said that this Ring was inspired by images of the aftermath of bush fires in his native Australia, and the idea of the despoliation of nature is suggested everywhere, without ever becoming a hectoring message. Instead there's an element of lightness, especially in the moments when we actually see the gods use their powers – the dispatching of Hunding is brilliantly done. This is put into relief by brute force elsewhere, especially from Christopher Maltman's Wotan, king of the gods, who since Rheingold has acquired a beard, a smugly full head of hair and a magnate's suit and tie. He, not Hunding, is the one who finishes off Siegmund, impaling him brutally on a shard of his own shattered sword – if you want a job doing, better do it yourself. If Romaniw's incisive Sieglinde is the standout – the Welsh-Ukranian soprano is gaining a more magnetic, energised presence on stage with every role – there are formidable performances all round: Stanislas de Barbeyrac's thoughtful but ardent Siegmund; Elisabet Strid's gleaming Brünnhilde, her glow dimming only at the end; Marina Prudenskaya's powerful Fricka; Soloman Howard's gun-toting cop Hunding, imposing if slightly unfocused of pitch. Maltman's baritone is full of velvet heft; though the sense of line falters in his quietest lines, the rest are thrillingly done, his voice soaring even when the orchestra seem to be playing at full tilt. This is all part of Pappano's sleight of hand: the quicksilver control of balance that centres the singers while bringing out layers of glorious orchestral detail. He conducts a performance bristling with tension, and the orchestra plays wonderfully. Once again, he brings them all up on stage to take the applause, each one an essential part of what is shaping up to be a very fine Ring cycle indeed. Until 17 May, and live in cinemas on 14 May
