Gluck

Wednesday

Richard Bratby

This is what opera should be like

‘Popolo di Pekino!’ The xylophone clatters but the Mandarin whose proclamation opens David McVicar’s new production of Turandot doesn’t wear a silk robe. He’s a kind of ringmaster; a sinister maitre d’ in top hat and jodhpurs, and he’s speaking into one of those chunky 1920s microphones. Behind him is a sumptuous art-deco theatre in an advanced state of decay, its gilded chinoiserie as tattered and cobwebby as the crowds that fill it – the ghosts, perhaps, of flapper girls and playboys, trapped in a world somewhere between Mervyn Peake and Scott Fitzgerald. A sort of Gormen-Gatsby, if you like. So no, it’s not China. But when was it ever, really? In every important respect this tremendous new staging has got it all.

Wednesday

Richard Bratby

Opera’s obsession with the Eastern bloc

There was a fad a while back for photo books about Eastern bloc architecture. Derelict megastructures, brutalist monuments; you couldn’t move for them in the Barbican gift shop. Anyhow, Patrick Nolan and Leslie Travers – the director and designer respectively of Opera North’s new production of Eugene Onegin – were presumably big fans, because they’ve relocated the action to a provincial sports centre in the dying years of the USSR. It’s a fairly common gambit with Slavic operas. British opera companies are surely world leaders, by now, at rendering faded paintwork and water-stained concrete. But why?

Thursday

Richard Bratby

A terrific night of opera: Zanetto/Orfeo ed Euridice, Arcola Theatre, reviewed

For a one-hit composer, we hear rather a lot of Pietro Mascagni. His reputation rests on his 1890 debut Cavalleria Rusticana, the one-act Sicilian shocker that’s usually yoked (not always to its advantage) to Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. But in recent years we’ve also seen the cod-medieval car crash of Isabeau, and a couple of outings for Iris, an opera that fuses orientalist opulence with tentacle porn, but not in a good way. In fairness, there have been winners too: Opera Holland Park revived L’amico Fritz in July, and this sun-kissed romcom about an Alsatian cherry farmer slipped down like a Negroni with audiences thirsty for a strong, sweet triple-shot of escapism, verismo-style.