Wacław Karaś News
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2024-04-23
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2023-11-13 07:42:00
Plenty of food for thought & some terrific singing: Oliver Mears' staging of Handel's Jephtha at the Royal Opera with a towering performance from Allan Clayton in the title role
Handel: Jephtha - Jennifer France - Royal Opera House (Photo: Marc Brenner)Handel: Jephtha; Allan Clayton, Alice Coote, Jennifer France, Cameron Shahbazi, Brindley Sherratt, director: Oliver Mears, conductor: Laurence Cummings; Royal Opera HouseReviewed 10 November 2023An incandescent performance by Allan Clayton in the title role with superb support the other soloists anchors the imaginative if flawed dramatic recreation of Handel's final oratorioIn adapting the story of Jephtha from the Bible for a dramatic work for Handel, the librettist Thomas Morell had to use quite a bit of imagination, to create a three hour drama out of the relatively curt Biblical references. A fine classicist, Morrell introduced elements from Greek drama, creating a work that it is tempting to see as naturally having a place on the stage. Concert performances of Handel's Jephtha are relatively common and I have seen many fine incarnations of the title role including John Mark Ainsley at the […]
2022-03-10 08:30:56
Anglais - Oliver Mears’s Rigoletto Finds its Stride at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
Some productions are tremendous on their first outing and never quite manage to recapture the same brilliance in subsequent revivals. Others discover that they need an initial outing before they find their feet, and the Royal Opera’s Rigoletto, from its Director of Opera Oliver Mears, would seem to fall into this latter category. It first appeared last September, but, aided by an outstanding cast, its first revival feels leaner and meaner in a great many ways. The good news is that once such productions hit their stride they tend to retain what they have achieved, meaning we have many good revivals to look forward to yet. Based on Victor Hugo’s play Le roi s’amuse, Giuseppe Verdi’s 1851 opera does not possess the same moral dimension as the majority of operas. While many works see the innocent suffer and die, there is usually a sense in which virtue has triumphed if only […]
2021-09-14 12:30:01
Royal opera House Rigoletto review – Oropesa is a matchless Gilda; this is one of the truly great performances
Royal Opera House, LondonOliver Mears’s striking staging posits a Mantua united by misogyny and violence and boasts a terrific cast, with Lisette Oropesa truly outstanding With full audiences returning to Covent Garden for the first time since March 2020, the Royal Opera opens its season with a new Rigoletto, conducted by Antonio Pappano and directed by Oliver Mears, his first staging for the company since his appointment as director of opera in 2017. It’s a powerful piece of theatre, strong on Shakespearean resonances and irony: we’re reminded more than once that Rigoletto is the closest we get to the King Lear that Verdi always said he wanted to write but never did. Mears’s Mantua is a place of sandstone walls and louring grey skies, where opulence and squalor exist side by side. Ilona Karas’s costumes, though non-specific as to period, suggest the 1980s, and the ducal court, got up in […]
2020-07-30 04:52:00
From Holland with Love (CD review)
Waltzes I've Saved for You. André Rieu, Johann Strauss Orchestra. Philips 314 522 933-2. Maybe I'm a sucker for sentimentality, but just as I liked Ofra Harnoy's recording of romantically-paced, vibrato-prone Dvorak (RCA) over twenty years ago and which I listened to at about the same time, I enjoyed this disc of old favorites from violinist André Rieu the more I listened to it. This is saying a lot, too, considering that I’m not particularly fond of overrated superstar performers with tens of millions of records to their credit. Playing with a band Rieu formed in 1987, the Johann Strauss Orchestra, and reminiscent of Willi Boskovsky's old Vienna Johann Strauss Orchestra, the conductor-violinist directs vigorous, lusty, sometimes boisterous, always zesty, and ultimately joyous performances of waltzes and polkas by the Strausses, Lehar, Gruber, and others. Andre Rieu However, […]
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