Results tagged “puccini” from Slipped disc

English National Opera are offering best seats for tomorrow's opening night of Jonathan Miller's new Boheme for as little as £20 - a saving of £59 they shout, in a last-minute email.

Just click online - www.eno.org - and you could be rubbing shoulders with the Great and the Good - you know, like the new chairman of the Arts Council, a gaggle of critics, some out-of-work actors and leading insolvency practitioners.

The premiere night has, admittedly, been postponed by two nights because of snow (let's not go there again).

But if ENO are having to give away best seats to its top draw for as little as one Adam Smith note (about $27 in greenbacks) it's not just the snow that's keeping folks at home. This could be turning into a box-office winter of severe discontent.

For the first time I can remember, an opera premiere in London has been cancelled by severe weather. The snow is six inches thick on the ground and Jonathan Miller's keenly awaited return to the Coliseum will have to be awaited until Wednesday, as English National Opera cannot guarantee getting its employees - let alone the audience - safely home to bed.

Such a shame. Three thousand people could have sung along to 'your tiny hand is frozen'.

Whatever happened to Spirit of the Blitz?

Having waited a lifetime for Korngold's Dead City to come around, I need never see it again.

No discredit to the Covent Garden production - a rehire from Salzburg, Vienna and San Francisco - nor to the London cast. Stephen Gould and Nadia Michael gave their all in the central roles and Ingo Metzmacher conducted with delicacy and conviction.

Seeing the work on stage, however, rather than hearing it on record and radio, I was forcibly struck by its irredeemable flaws - a libretto of plodding banality and a plot that arouses neither sympathy nor empathy with any of the characters.

The story: man loses wife, locks himself in a room, fantasises about a dancer, tries to throttle her, leaves the room. There is not enough there for an opera, and the leaden lines that were cobbled together by the composer and his father are either lumpen or artificial, putting the whole show at several removes from reality. There is no depth, no philosophy, no meaning. Were it not for the composer's Jewishness, the Nazis would never have banned it.

Korngold's music is demonstrably derivative - Puccini, Strauss, Mahler and a straight lift from Lehar that I'd never spotted before - and the return of its one great aria at the close is a cynical bid to simulate feeling for a cut-out who never becomes a character.

I'm glad to have seen Dead City and I urge everyone to catch it while you can because it is, as I have argued elsewhere, a birth moment for modern opera. But I'm not expecting it to hang around in repertoire for very long. The piece has too many flaws. It did its job. It's over.