Tag Archives: Welsh National Opera

Writer: Bella and Samuel Spewack  Music and Lyrics: Cole Porter     Directors: Jo Davies/Ed Goggin Reviewer: Dawn Smallwood Opera North’s Kiss Me Kate returns to the Leeds Grand Theatre after its successful revival back in 2015.  This acclaimed production, in collaboration with Welsh National Opera, makes a short stop in Leeds before transferring to the London Coliseum.  Kiss Me Kate premiered ...

Director: David Pountney Conductor: Carlo Rizzi Set designer: Raymond Bauer Reviewer: Julia Beasley The force of destiny is not in Leonora’s favour. Against her father’s wishes, she plans to elope with a freedom fighter. It all goes wrong when he accidentally kills her dad. Her brother vows to avenge his father’s death. Leonora runs away and becomes a hermit. The ...

Director / Revival Director: Michael Blakemore / Benjamin Davis Music: Giacomo Puccini Text: Giuseppe Giacosa / Luigi Illica Reviewer: Helen Tope Lust, greed, violence and corruption. As a mission statement, Tosca certainly meets every one of its objectives; the 1900 classic retains an edge a century on. With librettists Giacosa and Illica (the dream team behind La Boheme and Madame Butterfly), Puccini has crafted an opera ...

Opera: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Libretto: Lorenzo de Ponte Original Director: John Caird Revival Director: Caroline Chaney Reviewer: Barbara Michaels Welsh National Opera’s production of Don Giovanni was damned with faint praise when it was brought to the stage seven years ago. The main issue at that time – as has happened all too frequently with other productions of this musically ...

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: Johann Strauss II Director: John Copley Conductor:  James Southall Revival Director: Sarah Crisp Reviewer: Daryl Holden “This evening, we will have a boring domestic comedy”. With this particular joke arising midway through the second act of Welsh National Opera’s Die Fledermaus, you would be forgiven for thinking that they are indeed talking about their own show. For the most ...

Composer: Giacomo Puccini Director: Joachim Herz Reviewer: John Kennedy A Marxist/Leninist rationale might have Madam Butterfly’s libretto seen as a retro-appropriated allegory of US colonial cultural and patriarchal exploitation. But then, opera never did really catch on in the Gulags. Meanwhile,  feminist critiques might suggest cynical, gender-bias hegemony. Ergo: in a Man’s world - things never change - tutti gli uomini ...

Music: Johann Straus II Libretto: Carl Haffner & Richard Genée Director: John Copley Reviewer: Barbara Michaels Fun and frolics in Die Fledermaus, one of the greatest of Viennese operettas. Last staged by Welsh National Opera six years ago, John Copley’s production keeps all the frills and frou-frou of the original first performed in Vienna in 1874. The plot, convoluted as ...