UK / WEST END OPERA NEWS COVERAGE - PAGE 2

If you liked Evita at the Palladium, you'll like Carmen at the Coliseum...

I’m looking forward to conducting Bizet’s Carmen for English National Opera (ENO) this autumn, alongside fellow conductor, Clelia Cafiero. Carmen’s extreme drama and memorable music makes it one of the best-loved operas by audiences worldwide....

Both director and designer have slightly too many ideas about what the show could be, and what is left is unresolved potential....

It’s over 40 years since English National Opera staged Rossini's Cinderella (La Cenerentola) and they open their 2025-26 season with a vibrant new production of the sparkling comedy. After the rocky time the company has had in recent times, it is great to see them having such fun on stage....

The Royal Opera House has announced a cast change for the September 24, 2025, performance of Puccini’s Tosca. Ailyn Pérez will perform the title role in place of Aleksandra Kurzak, who has withdrawn due to illness....

If you come to opera via film musicals and, later, stage shows, Tosca is amongst the most accessible. The story of the lovers and the evil apparatchik is told at a furious pace, trauma after trauma piling up as the emotional heft becomes all but unbearable. There’s no standing about for twenty min...

Mozart's beloved comedy The Marriage of Figaro opened Glyndebourne's very first Festival in 1934 and is the renowned opera house's most performed work. No sooner has the production closed in Sussex, it reappeared in London at the BBC Proms for a super semi-staged version....

Speranza Scappucci will make her debut as Principal Guest Conductor of The Royal Opera with Verdi’s The Sicilian Vespers, opening on the Main Stage September 19 and running through October 6, 2025. ...

In the 35 years I've been going to Opera Holland Park, I've never been disappointed by the music, performances and sheer joy of being in the open air with accompanying local sound effects. The odd resident peacock squawking, planes soaring overhead, shouts from children kicking a football and dogs b...

This is a great opportunity to hear the breadth of Beethoven’s work performed in a novel way, and the drama does have its flashes of brilliance. In order to preserve these fleeting moments of conviction, though, Beethoven: I Shall Hear in Heaven needs to move away from tired biographical tropes an...

Jennifer France gives everything in a role demanding bel canto singing and bloody revenge...

It's a long way from Santiago to the West End. Isabela Díaz explains how she did it and what the Jette Parker Programme means to its artists...

Now on its third revival, Rodula Gaitanou's heart-stopping version of Verdi's tragic La Traviata is as affecting as ever. Opening with courtesan Violetta gasping for air, it never lets up its hold on the senses....

Adapted from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, director Richard Jones’s glorious Falstaff makes a welcome return to Glyndebourne, losing none of its charm or deft comedy. It is playful, witty and a pure delight....

Forget Arcadian landscapes and Corinthian columns. Oliver Mears’s new production of Handel’s Semele remoulds Greek myth to a 20th century manor house where mortals are servants of Gods who lounge around in velvet ball gowns. Semele is a maid plucked from service by master of the house, a cigaret...

You could be forgiven for thinking that there isn’t much more to be said about Le nozze di Figaro, the most performed opera in Glyndebourne’s history. However, Mozart’s classic role subversion comedy is deceptive in its simplicity: beneath the farce and improbable plot twists is a complex web ...

A thoughtfully selected double bill making up the operetta segment of Opera Holland Park’s summer season shows the genre at its technical best, but also illuminates its troubling shortcomings....

Le Nozze di Figaro is a piece I’ve been living with as long as I can remember. To me, it might be the best opera ever written: it makes me laugh, it moves me to tears, the plot twists still fill me with delight, and all the characters have potential for complexity and depth. It is the only piece I...

Even ardent opera fans may struggle to recall the story or the score for Mazeppa. Based on a poem by Pushkin, Tchaikovsky's opera has been unjustly overshadowed by his Eugene Onegin. Last staged at the London Coliseum in 1984, Grange Park Opera have landed a coup by engaging the English National O...

Just how much fun can you have at an oratorio about a Old Testament tale of jealousy, madness and death? Well, quite a lot as it happens at the return of Barry Kosky's remarkable production of Handel's Saul. This staging is opera at its most theatrical, with severed heads, a breast-feeding witch, a ...

Grange Park Opera has opened its new season with a crowd-pleaser. Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly remains problematic, with its story of a Japanese teenage geisha, impregnated and cruelly abandoned by an American lieutenant. However, it is still wildly popular, mainly due to its ravishing score....

Opera Holland Park has never shied away from audacious programming, and with Jonathan Dove’s Itch, it plunges boldly into radioactive territory—literally. Originally seen here in 2023 and based on Simon Mayo’s YA novel about a teenage element hunter who stumbles upon a potentially world-alteri...

Stormy weather and an enthusiastic audience mark Julia Burbach’s The Flying Dutchman as it proves a smashing success to open the 2025 season of Opera Holland Park....

Celebrating its sixth revival, David McVicar’s critically acclaimed production of Faust is a spectacular success with stunning sets and costumes, a magnificent cast, and some of Gounod’s greatest music....

Opera buffa is an ever-popular genre of the art, and more than two centuries after its composition, Rossini's Il barbière di Siviglia remains one this genre's most often staged operas. The music and lyrics are pure genius, but the success of this particular opera comes from an inherent understand...

Super show that lightens a very dark subject (corecive control), but does not diminish it...

The Royal Ballet and Opera launches its 2025/26 Season, unveiling an unforgettable programme of new commissions, world premieres and much-loved revivals alongside the first annual festival connecting the worlds of opera and technology. ...

With plenty of colour, masks, and a mystical ambience, Andrei Șerban’s 1984 production of Turandot feels just as fresh as ever. Paired with a stellar cast on top form, it represents a great success, all around....

An animated revival of Adele Thomas’s 2023 production, Il Trovatore strays from realism and instead focuses on a symbolic reading of this dark and gritty opera. With macabre medieval costumes, eery effects and a brilliant cast, it’s an unnerving experience....

The chorus of the Welsh National Opera have voted unanimously to take further action short of strike on Thursday 27 February and Saturday 1 March, affecting shows on these dates....

Welsh National Opera has announced its 2025/2026 Season, which will also see the Company celebrate its 80th anniversary. WNO will visit Birmingham Hippodrome in May 2026 with a brand-new production of The Flying Dutchman (Thu 7 May 2026) and the return of Blaze of Glory! (Fri 8 May 2026)....

And so to the final new production of English National Opera’s season; Mary, Queen of Scots, directed by Stewart Laing and conducted by Joana Carneiro. Scottish composer Thea Musgrave’s opera was last heard in London at Sadler’s Wells back in 1980, after premiering in Edinburgh in 1977, with ...

Thea Musgrave’s rarely performed Mary, Queen of Scots makes its London and English National Opera (ENO) premiere in February 2025. See first look photos of the production....

Mark-Anthony Turnage has a provocative habit of turning unconventional narratives into opera...

Joe Hill-Gibbins’s new production of The Marriage of Figaro for English National Opera opened back in March 2020 for a single performance before Covid struck. Thankfully, nearly five years on it has been given a second life at the London Coliseum and it is a riotous delight from start to finish....

Robert Carsen's vision is as uncompromising as ever, but the world has changed in three short years...

An intrepid British fringe opera company and its dauntless conductor-arranger have taken on a bold project that has defeated any number of high-profile companies. ...

It’s a mistake to dismiss Claus Guth’s production of Janacek’s Jenůfa as symbolically overwrought and interminably grey. Look closer and you’ll discover a duality to each beguiling appearance....

Angelina Jolie is compelling in a movie that concentrates on the misery to the exclusion of almost everything else in the diva's life...

Macabre and spectacular, this is Christmas fare as it once was and should still be, fully trusting its audience. ...