We left at the interval...

La Monnaie, Brussels, Saturday 15 and Sunday 16 April 2023 Conductor and Musical Arrangements: Francesco Lanzillotta. Concept, Script and Production: Olivier Fredj. Sets and Costumes: Urs Schönebaum. Costumes: Petra Reinhardt. Video: Sarah Derendinger. Choreography: Avshalom Pollak. Elisabetta: Myrtò Papatanasiu. Anna Bolena: Salome Jicia. Leicester: Enea Scala. Enrico: Luca Tittoto. Giovanna Seymour, Sara: Raffaella Lupinacci. Amy Robsart: Valentina Mastrangelo. Maria Stuarda: Lenneke Ruiten. Roberto Devereux: Sergey Romanovsky. Nottingham: Bruno Taddia. Smeton: David Hansen. Cecil: Gavan Ring. Elisabetta as a child: Hadley Dean Randerson. Orchestra and Chorus of La Monnaie. Photos: Bernd Uhlig, La Monnaie  From La Monnaie's website: Part 1 : The first part of Bastarda focuses on the life of young Elizabeth: from her childhood, marked by the tragic death of her mother Anne Boleyn, through her unexpected coronation to the ultimate confrontation with her cousin and rival Mary Stuart...

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday December 23 2018 Conductor: Alain Altinoglu. Production and costumes: Laurent Pelly. Sets: Chantal Thomas. Lighting: Duane Schuler. Don Pasquale: Pietro Spagnoli. Dottor Malatesta: Rodion Pogossov. Ernesto: Anicio Zorzi Giustiniani. Norina: Anne-Catherine Gillet. Un Notaro: Alessandro Abis. La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. Like Beethoven advising Rossini but at my much less exalted level, I'd be quite happy if Donizetti had stuck to comic operas. Laurent Pelly's production of Don Pasquale , already seen in San Diego and Barcelona, was an unpretentiously and undemandingly good-humoured way to end the operatic year just before Christmas. The set was simple: Don Pasquale's house in the middle of a square, with, to right and left, walls of doors, windows and shutters, all grey, and to the rear, nothing. The house rotated to reveal the Don's living room, bare but for his high, button-backed leather armchair and an elaborate cent...

La Monnaie at the Cirque Royal, Brussels, Sunday March 3 2013 Conductor: Julian Reynolds. Production: Guy Joosten. Sets: Johannes Leiacker. Costumes: Jorge Jara. Lighting: Manfred Voss. Don Alfonso, Duca di Ferrara: Paul Gay. Donna Lucrezia Borgia: Elena Mosuc. Gennaro: Charles Castronovo. Maffio Orsini: Silvia Tro Santafé. Jeppo Liverotto: Roberto Covatta. Don Apostolo Gazella: Tijl Faveyts. Ascanio Petrucci: Jean-Luc Ballestra. Gubetta: Jean Teitgen. Rustighello: Alexander Kravets. Astolfo: Justin Hopkins. Oloferno Vitellozzo: Stefan Cifolelli. Usciere: Alain-Pierre Wingelinckx. Un coppiere: Gerard Lavalle. La Monnaie orchestra and chorus . I’ve decided this report will be truffled, as the French say (i.e. like a goose liver or white pudding) with quotations. Though I’ve said before it’s probably not pukka to quote yourself, it saves time; so I started out (you’ll soon see why) going back over my recent write-ups from Brussels, looking for things to copy and paste. Then, perusi...

ONP Bastille, Saturday October 27 2012 Conductor: Marco Armiliato. Production and costumes: Laurent Pelly. Sets: Chantal Thomas. Lighting: Joël Adam. Choreography: Laura Scozzi. Marie: Natalie Dessay. La Marquise de Berkenfield: Doris Lamprecht. La Duchesse de Crakentorp: Dame Felicity Lott. Tonio: Juan Diego Florez. Sulpice: Alessandro Corbelli. Hortensius: Francis Dudziak. Orchestra and chorus of the Opéra National de Paris. Florez was fabulous. This well-travelled production is so familiar, I thought I might get away with writing nothing else about last night's performance. After London, Vienna, Milan, Barcelona and New York, here it all is in Paris, as seen on TV, DVD and YouTube. The barricades of beds, old furniture and grandfather clocks on handcarts, the chorus armed with pots and pans, pitchforks and carpet-beaters. The Tyrolean landscape of old maps, criss-crossed with "Siegfried lines" of long johns, and in the second part, the Marchioness's parlour ...

Teatro Massimo, Palermo, Thursday May 27 2010. Conductor: Fabrizio Maria Carminati. Production, sets, costumes and lighting: Denis Krief. Elisabetta: Kate Aldrich. Maria Stuarda : Dimitra Theodossiou. Anna Kennedy: Patrizia Gentile. Roberto di Leicester: Shalva Mukeria. Giorgio Talbot: Mirco Palazzi. Lord Guglielmo Cecil Silvio Zanon. Orchestra and chorus of the Teatro Massimo. If there is one compensation (other than a pittance) for the indignity of having to go to work every day, it must be having colleagues in Italy. It was thanks to mine that I found myself at the Teatro Massimo the other evening for an excellent performance of Maria Stuarda (and later at a table in a cobbled square for an excellent Sicilian dinner as well) with one exception: the costumes. I’ll explain later. Naturally, I’d wondered beforehand how good it could be. As people who know me know, I’m not a great lover, musically speaking, of either Donizetti or, especially, Bellini (whose organ-grinder scores seem to...

La Monnaie (Cirque Royal), Sunday April 26 2009 Conductor: Julian Reynolds. Production: Guy Joosten. Lucia: Elena Mosuc. Edgardo di Ravenswood: John Osborn. Lord Enrico Ashton: Angelo Veccia. Lord Arturo Bucklaw: Jean-François Borras. Raimondo Bidebent: Giorgio Giuseppini. Alisa: Catherine Keen. Normanno: Carlo Bosi. La Monnaie orchestra and chorus. Glass harmonica: Sascha Reckert. One of the striking things about Brussels is that, unlike in Paris, say, or New York, you see old people everywhere. The Taverne du Passage opened over 80 years ago, since when nothing has changed (“immuable” is the word used on the website), and that seems to include the customers: the regulars look like they’ve been eating a weekly Waterzoï in that art-deco setting since the 1920s. The couple next to us on Sunday were so ancient that all they could manage for lunch was a glass of beer; soup and bread; a heaped chafing-dish of lamb chops, with potato croquettes, asparagus and a jug of red wine on the si...

ONP Bastille, Friday November 3, 2006 Conductor: Edward Gardner. Production and costumes: Laurent Pelly. Sets: Chantal Thomas. Adina: Heidi Grant Murphy. Nemorino: Charles Castronovo. Belcore: Laurent Naouri. Dulcamara: Alberto Rinaldi. Giannetta: Aleksandra Zamojska. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris. Director Laurent Pelly has entertained Lyon and Paris with a string of successful comic opera productions (broken by Ariadne auf Naxos, the dud that proves the rule) now more widely known thanks to DVD: Orphée aux Enfers, La Belle Hélène, La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein, Platée … His L’Elisir d’Amore exudes a freshness and youthful joie de vivre rarely experienced in the opera house, successfully reproducing the carefree atmosphere of Italian cinema in the 50s and 60s. The simple sets – stacks of hay bales, one of them covered with tarpaulins held down with tyres; a patch of ground by a country crossroads, with a café and a lean-to housing plastic crates; a d...

ONP – Bastille, Monday October 2 2006 Conductor: Evelino Pidò. Production: Andrei Serban. Sets and costumes: William Dudley. Lucia: Natalie Dessay. Edgardo di Ravenswood: Matthew Polenzani. Arturo Bucklaw: Salvatore Cordella. Enrico Ashton: Ludovic Tézier. Raimondo Bidebent: Kwangchul Youn. Alisa: Marie-Thérèse Keller. Normanno: Christian Jean. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris. Natalie Dessay was the third soprano I’d seen as Lucia in Serban’s once-notorious, now simply familiar “gymnasium” production. The first, June Anderson, was as vocally over-cautious and dramatically inexistent as in New York a year or so before: a bore. Mariella Devia, the second, was vocally a huge improvement. But even she did not quite have Dessay’s outstanding acting skills and magnetism, which (along with the welcome presence of a glass harmonica in the pit) made this by far the best Lucia I’ve ever witnessed. Whether it’s the effect of two operations or simply of age, Dessay’s voice has ...