Music
Brilliant new production in English by ENO at the London Coliseum of The Rise and Fall of The City of Mahagonny. Brecht tackles the big themes: food, sex, fights and whiskey: so basically decadence. Weil’s music fortifies this, both in songs and underpinning dialogue and speeches. The Coliseum is one of London’s largest stages but the austere staging and lighting managed to convey the aesthetic of an intimate production, as in the early Berlin performances at the Kroll theatre.
The Rise and Fall of The City of Mahagonny is an opera that is still difficult to take in because of its overt political commentary, much of which seems simplistic and now dated. The first night of Mahagonny in Berlin in 1930 was besieged by protesters, not the only opera in history to trigger riots but these were Nazis and eventually they destroyed almost all of copies of Mahagonny when the publishers were raided then burnt out.
Read more: The Rise and Fall of The City of Mahagonny - ENO at the London Coliseum
Mel Giedroyc, John Savournin, Neal Davies, Matthew Kofi Waldren, Thomas Atkins, Henna Mun
H.M.S. Pinafore; or, The Lass That Loved a Sailor,
Comic opera in two acts, music by Arthur Sullivan, libretto by W. S. Gilbert.
The Mikado was the first opera I ever saw performed live, this was a school production where the thrill was as much seeing our teachers let their hair down as the music or the script. Possibly that’s as much the authentic tradition of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Savoy operas as a polished London production. Whether that first experience encouraged or quelled my interest in opera is impossible to say but tonight’s English National Opera revival of HMS Pinafore at the London Coliseum was top-notch in terms of music, staging and costumes. The ENO chorus were exceptional with their ensemble and choreography, including an acrobatics specialist.
A lively, modern performance of W.A. Mozart’s classic comic opera at the Proms. Figaro harks back to an earlier and apparently simpler time, of servants and Countesses; nonetheless there is a war somewhere. But seeing “The Marriage of Figaro” in a semi-staged version of Glyndebourne’s new production is an escape from the realities of our era with some of W.A. Mozart’s most sublime music.
Read more: ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ from Glyndebourne at the Proms 2025
The Nutcracker magic starts with the first notes of Tchaikovsky’s music taking us in to the world of the supernatural. This production is about the dance, the costumes and the tunes. Of course there’s the story but it’s almost impossible to follow. And within the world of the Nutcracker, it’s magnificent. But in 1913, just twenty-one years after the first performance of The Nutcracker in 1892, The Rite of Spring erupted in to the world of ballet and nothing would be the same again.
Classic Royal Ballet production this, now the definitive British interpretation. It was the most complete London production when it first appeared in 1984, when it displaced Nureyev’s 1968 version. As expected, this revival was light and beautiful, sprinkled lightly with magic dust with little of the dark undercurrents and menace brought out in contemporary dance productions.
Read more: The Nutcracker - Royal Ballet, Covent Garden 2025
Well that was an extraordinary recital, I’ve never been to anything like it. Firstly the restored cathedral looks fantastic inside, the masonry is clean and white, the rose stained-glass windows newly bright too. The huge space of one of the tallest of the Gothic cathedrals seems both enhanced but also relatable somehow: it doesn’t recede in to the dim distance like I think it used to, the bright stone and new lighting imposes on you.
I haven’t heard this organ since I passed through Paris on my way back from Lausanne before I went to university, when fortuitously the organ was being played. I’ve never quite forgotten the impact of this big instrument in a magnificent Gothic cathedral with the reverberations being as much a part of the music as the notes.
Read more: Yves Castagnet at the organ of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris
