We left at the interval...

Théâtre des Champs Elysées (TCE), Paris Wednesday November 6 2025 Conductor: Jakob Lehmann. Production, sets, and costumes: Silvia Costa, assisted by Laura Ketels, Ama Tomberli, Simon Hatab, Michele Taborelli. Lighting: Marco Giusti. Faust: Benjamin Bernheim. Marguerite: Victoria Karkacheva. Méphistophélès: Christian Van Horn. Brander: Thomas Dolié. Les Siècles orchestra. Radio France chorus and children's choir. Photos: Vincent Pontet Silvia Costa has been around long enough, assisting Romeo Castellucci and directing films, plays and operas herself, to have won an artistic knighthood in France as a ‘Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres’, but this Damnation was my first experience of her work, and proved baffling. As with Shirin Neshat’s recent Aida , I’ll start by outlining the production, as its weaknesses impacted the musical side of the evening. This bald outline should also give those not present an insight into why , without preparation, I found the staging baffling, but of cou...

I was still on holiday in Greece when the latest two issues of France's Opéra Magazine arrived, so I found them in the pile of post waiting for me when I got home a couple of weeks ago. The first was marked ‘Septembre 2025’ as normal. The second, marked ‘Octobre-Novembre 2025’, announced out of the blue, in its editorial, that ‘In order to provide you with more in-depth articles, more substantial investigations and richer information, we will now be publishing every two months.’ A cheeky bit of spin, I think, from a magazine that’s recently changed hands and, so I understand, since then lost or fired most of its staff. Their ‘coup de coeur’ - i.e. their top pick - in September, with one of their special ‘Diamond’ awards, was Dido and Aeneas with Joyce DiDonato and Michael Spyres under Emelyanchev, dubbed a new ‘reference’ and ‘set to be seen as a landmark recording.’ It doesn't happen often, but their top pick in the October-November, again with one of their ‘Diamonds’, is a ...

ONP-Bastille, Wednesday October 22 2025 Conductor: Dmitry Matvienko. Production: Shirin Neshat. Sets: Christian Schmidt. Costumes: Tatyana van Walsum. Lighting: Felice Ross. Choreography: Dustin Kline. Aida: Ewa Płonka. Radames: Gregory Kunde. Amneris: Judit Kutasi. Amonasro: Roman Burdenko. Ramfis: Alexander Köpeczi. Il Re: Krzysztof Bączyk. Un messaggero: Manase Latu. Sacerdotessa: Margarita Polonskaya. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris. Photos (featuring first cast): Bernd Uhlig/ONP When the Paris Opera staged Olivier Py’s production of Aida in 2013, it was their first since 1968, in one that dated back to 1939. Since then, they’ve made up for their omission. Py’s (to me, not as bad as people said) made it through just two seasons, until 2016. Lotte de Beer’s , with its luxury cast, in 2021, which I found quite entertaining though thousands didn’t, apparently succumbed to the pandemic. Now, in 2025, we have a revised ‘edition’, as she herself puts it, of Shirin Ne...

La Monnaie at Bozar, Brussels, Sunday October 19 2025 Conductor: Dmitry Matvienko. Mezzo-soprano: Olesya Petrova. La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra. Photos: credits not found Mussorgsky: A Night on the Bare Mountain , orch. Rimsky-Korsakov. Mussorgsky: Songs and Dances of Death , orch. Shostakovich. Shostakovich: Symphony N°5.  In the last few years, La Monnaie has got into the habit of including a concert in its Sunday matinee subscription series - probably, as times are hard, to save money. But now that Alain Altinoglu has hoisted the house orchestra to unanticipated heights, these concerts have actually become something of an event: quite often, they turn out to be memorable, well worth the trip to Brussels. Sunday's programme of Mussorgsky and Shostakovich involved two names new to me. Timur Zangiev, who conducted Tsar Saltan at La Monnaie in 2023 , had to cancel ‘owing to unforeseen circumstances'. (Visa issues, I heard, though that seems odd when he's been allowed in bef...

  The opera season is over and I'm off to Greece. Next post: October 2025.

Once again, I simply forgot to post anything about June's 'pick of the month' in France's monthly Opéra Magazine . So here are their favourites for June, July and August. In June, they chose the Palazzetto Bru Zane’s release, in one of its usual, lavish CD books with the usual, thorough documentation, of Lalo’s Le Roi d’Ys . It features Nicolas Courjal, Kate Aldrich, Cyrille Dubois, Jérôme Boutillier, Christian Helmer, the Hungarian National Choir and Phil., all under Vashegyi, who ‘gives the most convincing reading that could be, the most varied in atmosphere, the most dramatically coherent. He is served by six soloists selected with the greatest care.’  With a little judicious clicking, you can find all the tracks in a playlist on YouTube . Their choice in their July-August double issue is Warner’s 79-CD box of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s complete Lieder and song recordings, celebrating his 100th birthday. There are no surprises: all of the recordings have appeared b...