Opera Today

Founded in 2004, OPERA TODAY is a premier online platform dedicated to opera and vocal music. The site features reviews of the latest performances, recordings, and literature, along with interviews with artists, insightful commentary, and links to up-to-date news. OPERA TODAY aims to be an essential resource for all opera enthusiasts.

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A Captivating & Immersive Eugene Onegin from Wild Arts Opera

3 days ago | operatoday.com | David Truslove

What a rare pleasure it was to encounter Wild Arts Opera at Layer Marney Tower in rural Essex. Amongst the delights within its fourth summer season, was the immersive experience of Tchaikovsky’s 1879 work staged within a medieval barn next to England’s tallest Tudor gatehouse, a location that could almost have been Madame Larina’s country estate.
Die Fledermaus splutters into life at the Grange Festival

5 days ago | operatoday.com | David Truslove

Grange Festival’s Fledermaus is a sprawling new production which improves with each act and ends with rib-tickling gags from flamboyant cabaret artiste Myra du Bois. By the time you’ve finished laughing at this drag queen’s brilliant Dame Edna style delivery, you may have forgotten the essence of Johann Strauss II’s revenge-filled entertainment and wafer-thin plot. Revenge is a dish usually served cold, but here it’s more warmly mischievous.
Monteverdi Choir and Masaaki Suzuki at St Martin-in-the-Fields

1 week ago | operatoday.com | David Truslove

Making his debut with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, Masaaki Suzuki directed an all-Bach concert celebrating the 300th anniversary of five works, four cantatas and a Sinfonia, written in 1725 when the composer was Thomaskantor in Leipzig.
Tchaikovsky’s disturbing but gripping Mazeppa at Grange Park

1 week ago | operatoday.com | David Truslove

Scenes of torture, execution and bleak rows of coffins may not be the cheeriest of hors d’oeuvres before your interval bubbly. This is Grange Park Opera’s new staging of Tchaikovsky’s rarely performed Mazeppa, where love and political ambition collide with fatal consequences. No chainsaw massacre here, as in David Alden’s presentation for English National Opera in 1984, but there’s still much to disturb with its graphic content.
Gothic horror meets Siegmund Freud in Saint-Saëns’s The Silver Bell at Winchester’s Theatre Royal

2 weeks ago | operatoday.com | David Truslove

Of Camille Saint-Saëns’s thirteen operas, only Samson and Dalila remains a regular part of the repertory. So, the enterprising New Sussex Opera must be congratulated on presenting the UK premiere of the composer’s first opera, Le Timbre d’argent, first given in Lewes, East Sussex, in May this year and supported by an effective English translation from Paul Featherstone.
A richly imagined and musically compelling Simon Boccanegra from Grange Park Opera

2 weeks ago | operatoday.com | David Truslove

The Viennese critic Edward Hanslick once compared Brahms’ Fourth Symphony to “a dark well”, and declared “the longer we look into it, the more brightly the stars shine back”. Such an observation might be levelled at Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, its convoluted plot drawn from the real-life 14th-century Doge of Genoa.
Memorable singing and vivid orchestral playing enliven Grange Festival’s Traviata

2 weeks ago | operatoday.com | David Truslove

Grange Festival’s new production of Verdi’s tragedy brings magnificent singing and much superb playing from the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under Richard Farnes who makes his house debut. Director Maxine Braham, also a first timer at this Greek revival mansion, opts for a traditional staging and takes a non-interventionist attitude avoiding any provocative interpretations on wealth, class and power. Hers is a subtle approach mostly allowing music and narrative to speak for themselves.
Emphatic singing characterises much of Garsington’s darkly imagined Queen of Spades

3 weeks ago | operatoday.com | David Truslove

When Tchaikovsky’s card-game opera first appeared at London’s Drury Lane Theatre in 1915, it was announced by The Times as ‘a romance’. That’s marketing for you and pushing things a bit far, even with Pushkin’s original novella of 1833, where Lisa marries a dull functionary, while the anti-hero Herman, diminished by his gambling addiction, is confined to a mental asylum.
An impressive season-opener from Opera Holland Park’s Flying Dutchman

4 weeks ago | operatoday.com | Gary Hoffman

It seems entirely appropriate that Holland Park Opera’s first venture into Richard Wagner should be Der fliegende Holländer. And where better in London to experience its storm-tossed drama within an open-sided auditorium where you felt every gust of wind, even the canvas roof billowing like sails from the Dutchman’s ghostly ship. Directed by Julia Burbach, this new production steers a canny path between Gothic fantasy and reality.
Glyndebourne’s musically gripping Parsifal

1 month ago | operatoday.com | David Truslove

Directors have a habit of interfering with composers’ intentions in their efforts to draw out new perspectives. That’s no bad thing when a novel approach creates insightful correspondences with the original conception. But the opening night of Glyndebourne’s first ever presentation of Parsifal, long dreamed-of by founder John Christie, drew a mixed reception, with some audible disapproval at the curtain calls.