Tag Archives: Robert Hayward

Composer: Giacomo Puccini with Librettist Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica Director: Edward Dick Conductor: Antony Hermus Reviewer: Dave Cunningham   Opera is an art form that demands grand themes and high passion to be most effective. Well, stories do not come more melodramatic than the doomed love affair between the diva Tosca and the painter Cavaradossi. Tosca (soprano Giselle Allen) lives ...

Music: Giacomo Puccini Libretto: Giuseppe Giacoso and Luigi Illica Director: Edward Dick Reviewer: Dawn Smallwood Tosca marks the start of Opera North’s autumn season, a special time as the company will have been founded exactly 40 years ago this November.  Tosca is a popular opera that made its very first performance in Rome back in 1900, while Opera North first ...

Music & Libretto: Leoš Janáček (libretto from Dostoyevsky’s novel, English translation by David Pountney) Director: David Pountney Designer: Maria Bjornson Lighting: Chris Ellis Conductor: Tomáš Hanus Reviewer: Leah Tozer The curtain rises on an intricate, ramshackle construction of bricks, boards, and broken men cascading across a remarkable, multi-levelled recreation of a communal prison cell. We see in, through a literal ...

Composer: Richard Wagner Concert staging and design concept: Peter Mumford English titles: Simon Rees Conductor: Richard Farnes Reviewer: Charlotte Broadbent Tonight's instalment of the The Ring Cycle is arguably the most iconic of Wagner's work. Perhaps even the most striking image in opera. For who doesn't conjure that stereotypical tableux of ladies in “viking” helmets heralding war? Opera North's Die ...

Composer: Umberto Giordano Libretto: Luigi Illica Director: Annabel Arden Conductor: Oliver von Dohnanyi Reviewer: Dave Cunningham More than a century before Les Miserables Composer Umberto Giordano set the French Revolution to a musical background. There are moments in Andrea Chenier where one wonders whether director Annabel Arden is cheekily referencing the blockbuster particularly as the first Act closes with the ...

Director: David Pountney Usher House Music &Text: Gordon Getty La Chute de la Maison Usher Music &Text: Claude Debussy Reviewer: Lauren Anders It isn’t often that a company can create a tension so high that the audience is sat on the edges of their seats before the curtain has even gone up, but this is exactly the reaction that Welsh ...

Music by: Giacomo Puccini Libretto Guelfo Civini and Carlo Zangarini Director: Aletta Collins Conductor: Richard Farnes Reviewer: Dave Cunningham Sung in Italian with a story set during the California gold rush ‘The Girl of the Golden West’ could be described as a ‘spaghetti opera’. The gold miners who patronise The Polka saloon are not clichéd hard drinking gamblers. Instead they ...

Music &Lyrics: Leos Janacek Director: Tom Cairns Conductor: Richard Farnes Reviewer: Iain Sykes [Rating:4.5] Legal proceedings, intrigue, virtual immortality, and a talented diva all seem unlikely subject for opera but in Leos Janacek’s The Makropulos Case, based on Karel Capek’s 1922 play of the same name, they combine perfectly into an opera which starts in a dull legal office and ...