Paul Levy measures the Angles
photograph by Clive Barda After a series of dud new productions, the English National Opera has at last got a palpable hit, with its first-ever staging of Handel’s Rodelinda, directed by Richard Jones and conducted by Christian Curnyn. The company needed this badly, especially in view of the failure of their new Rigoletto, an ill-advised replacement for their money-spinning old production … [Read more...]
The English National Opera has a really big problem – or, rather, has given itself a big problem. It has decided to “refresh” its core repertory by commissioning a new production of Verdi’s Rigoletto. The rub is that the former staging wasn’t just any old Rigoletto, it was Jonathan Miller’s greatest of all Rigolettos, first staged in 1982 – a production that brought new audiences to the … [Read more...]
Dear George Clooney, As another Lexington, Kentucky boy, I’ve often wanted to write a fan letter to you. (I’ve been told that some members of our families knew each other, though I’m a good deal older than you, and left my old KY home when you were a child.) Monuments Men is the perfect excuse, as I’m now working on a feature and a video piece for The Wall … [Read more...]
Royal Opera House Director of Opera Kasper Holten’s first dive into directing a production at Covent Garden was a belly-flop Eugene Onegin. He was been more successful with the current Don Giovanni, at least to the extent that seeing and hearing it is an enjoyable experience. If his staging contains no new insights into the piece or its title character, it is good to look at, and sung and played … [Read more...]
The secret of the success of Hilary Mantel’s novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies is seeing the events of the reign of Henry VIII through the eyes of an unlikely character in the grand sweep of history, Thomas Cromwell. A London lawyer with a reputation for toughness and bullying, the son of a butcher and therefore not a gentleman, a collector of books by Luther and Tyndale’s bible – and … [Read more...]
News came recently of the death of a friend, Alistair McAlpine – Lord McAlpine of West Green. The obituaries have naturally focussed on his political career, rather than on Alistair’s stellar importance as a collector and patron of the arts with a golden gift for friendship. This is understandable, as he was Treasurer of the Conservative Party during Mrs Thatcher’s premiership, and seldom out of … [Read more...]
Once in a while you come across a production that makes you scratch your head - why did the company do this? How could anyone ever have thought this worked? But it is rare that you see something that makes you wonder why the institution is in receipt of a public subsidy to present a piece that fails not because it's daring or experimental, but just because it's so bad it should never have been … [Read more...]
There have been some ups and some downs among the events of this Wagner bicentenary year. There was the reportedly naff new Ring at Bayreuth - so bad, some of the press said, that the German state must now think again about its support for the Wagner family management of the Festival. But there have been some high points, too. … [Read more...]
Donizetti's Don Pasquale has a dramaturgical problem. The 70-something Pasquale wants to marry and produce heirs, as his young heir-apparent nephew, Ernesto, has refused the arranged marriage proposed for him by his uncle. Pasquale's doctor, Malatesta has nominated himself as Pasquale's marriage-broker, but the woman he proposes is Norina, the young widow who is the secret squeeze of Ernesto. … [Read more...]
Very recently the UK Border Agency refused visas to visit Britain to one of the curators of the Shubbak festival, an annual celebration in London of modern Arab arts. Also vetoed were visas for two authors from Gaza. Earlier this year, said Boyd Tonkin of The Independent (on 29 June), "a deal-hungry literary agent from Turkey, guest of honour at the London Book Fair" was denied entry to … [Read more...]