Tag: Welsh National Opera

Review: WNO’s La Cenerentola

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Original Review: Broadway World UK

WNO's La Cenerentola

The magic’s in the music

The original Italian premiere of Rossini’s rags-to-riches opera was more morally pragmatic than magical: with a ‘goodness triumphs’ moral in its title (‘La bontà in trionfo’), Roman Catholicism restricting an unclothed foot from appearing in the performance, and nineteenth-century theatrics making transformations impractical, the music was the magic. And the music is magical, with all its coloratura, patter, and character from the principals, male chorus, and orchestra magnificently managed by Tomáš Hanus, but there’s still some magic amiss in this staging from Welsh National Opera.

La Cenerentola falls away from the French fairy tale and into the Grimm’s grotesque without a fairy godmother or twelve o’clock curfew, and Joan Font’s staging fuels the fantasy with giant mice and the suggestion that it was all a sugarcoated fever-dream danced in Joan Guillén’s garish costumes.

The opera follows in the footsteps of the fairytale Continue reading “Review: WNO’s La Cenerentola” →

Review: WNO’s Die Fledermaus

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Original review: Underdog Reviews

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A farcical, fun-filled frolic

As the saying – and singing, in this opera – goes, ‘chacun à son gout!’: ‘to each his own taste’, and the taste of Welsh National Opera’s Die Fledermaus is champagne – bubbly, celebratory, flamboyant, but with a little bit of bitterness in the aftertaste.

Die Fledermaus is an operetta caught somewhere between Restoration and Shakespearean comedy: a well-moneyed misdemeanant – a markedly strong Mark Stone – seems more interested in other women than his own wife, everyone from the mischievous chambermaid to her suspicious mistress set about scheming their way into a masquerade ball, an elaborate if improbable plot featuring false identities, lots of flirting and a few faux-Frenchmen, and, of course, a finale where all is forgiven and the ruse is revealed. This is operetta with frills-and-all, and with all the fun and frolics, it’s more than just the misbehaving husband who’s getting merrily mocked, it’s the opulence and improbability of opera, too. Continue reading “Review: WNO’s Die Fledermaus” →

Review: WNO’s From the House of the Dead

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Original review: The Reviews Hub

WNO's From the House of the Dead

Rough-and-ready and wistfully raw

The curtain rises on an intricate, ramshackle construction of bricks, boards, and broken men cascaded across a remarkable, multi-levelled recreation of a communal prison cell. We see in through a literal break in the fourth wall, as if one side of the set has been broken apart by an unseen force, and the literal and metaphorical walls keep coming down to reveal, in all their tough-and-tenderness, the men and the motives behind the criminals and their crimes.

David Pountney’s production of From the House of the Dead is a series of vignettes from the view of the deadened and slowly dying convicts as they survive the cruelty and uniformity of captivity and escape into a life once lived outside the four walls of their confinement. Their recollections and reflections are ragtag and fragmentary and resist many operatic conventions: the prisoners interrupt each other’s arias, there’s no concrete plot, and the cast has no principals but perform as a collective. For some, From the House of the Dead may feel more ragged than ragtag, but it works to reflect the rough-and-ready, unrefined reality of the prisoners’ experiences both within the prison and without. Continue reading “Review: WNO’s From the House of the Dead” →