Opera past and present in guises old and new.

Not a tidy tragedy

Kat’a Kabanova, Opera Holland Park, London

Getting on for a century old, this piece feels very modern. Partly because the music is neither dusty nor ostentatiously avant-garde, so it hasn’t dated. Partly, too, because it is a classically naturalistic work, in which the details of character and setting show a specific world which is not timeless, but of its time.

In love with love

L’Amour de Loin, ENO, Coliseum, London

This is less the story of a relationship than an exploration of why two people choose it instead of a real relationship. When Rudel’s actual poems are sung in the medieval French, the music takes a turn that evokes the music of that period, full of harsh, primitive harmonies, archaic scales and a note of loss and sadness. These songs are what bind Jaufré and his Countess together.

Transient convenience

Madam Butterfly, English National Opera, Coliseum, London

Flocks of paper birds on long sticks rise and wheel over the garden, and the menacing entrance of Butterfly’s uncle, the Bonze, is accompanied by twirling black ribbons wielded by the black-veiled puppeteer chorus. At times, their ninja-like presence is distracting. Using Bunraku-style puppets can feel pointless. What does it add that a real child could not do?

Chilling discords

Peter Grimes, English National Opera, Coliseum, London

Paul Steinberg’s sets manage to capture the fishing-town feel, at once bleak and claustrophobic. But the visual style of the production is almost expressionist, with its high, slanting blocks of architecture and stylised movement.

Night waiting for dawn

Dr Atomic, English National Opera, Coliseum, London

The music continues to be glorious. The staging is evocative, the visuals epic. But there is no suspense. We know the end of this story, after all. We know it will detonate, there will not be a chain reaction that ignites the atmosphere, Oppenheimer will live to doubt his decisions.

Slightly mad but strangely workable

Opera Shorts, C Central, Edinburgh

One of the first Edinburgh Fringe musical shows to not be a ‘musical’, Opera Shorts is based on a similar format to the fashionable ‘Future Shorts’ film series, now a nationwide phenomenon.

Finish in time for fireworks!

Ariadne auf Naxos, Royal Opera House, London

Are we not the very ones who will be ‘falling asleep after dinner’, as Zerbinetta predicts? If art is being prostituted to please a philistine appetite, don’t they mean us, with our pre-theatre dinners and post-theatre drinks?

Grimeborn Opera

Arcola Theatre, London

Is it far-fetched to imagine that any piece of music can be staged and shown in a theatre? These performances outlined three different visions of love and desire, where music is both the starting and final point of a human adventure… the adventure of musical composition itself.

Children of Adam

Royal Opera House, London

Marriott loses sight of the thing that really unites poetry and classical dance. In a word, form. Instead he plumbs for a degraded notion of both poetry and dance as a sopping wet melodrama of emotion - it’s the ‘let-it-all-hang-out-and-feel-my-pain’ school of art.

Agrippina

ENO, Coliseum, London

In many respects, Handel’s Agrippina becomes a woman’s opera under McVicar’s direction. The plot and its intricacies are driven by Agrippina (Part I) and Poppea (Part II). Power and cruelty, love and lust gravitate around Agrippina and Poppea respectively. McVicar’s staging is a symbiosis of musical and literary genres.

Nixon in China

English National Opera, Coliseum, London

This is a opera that celebrates heroic failure; it’s not whether you win or lose, but the fact that you play the game. As Chou says ‘We fight, we die, and if we do not fight we die’. Nothing about either Adams’ opera or this ENO performance smacks of failure, however.

Wozzeck

Royal Opera House, London

‘Man is an abyss’ - Keith Warner seems to have taken this as the defining phrase for his production of Berg’s dark opera about the hapless Wozzeck, victim turned murderer.