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Richard Bratby

~ Classical music writer, critic and consultant

Richard Bratby

Tag Archives: Birmingham Hippodrome

Review: Madam Butterfly (Welsh National Opera)

07 Friday Jul 2017

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Birmingham Hippodrome, Puccini, Reviews, Welsh National Opera

wno_madam_butterfly_2017_cast_photo_credit_jeremy_abrahams

It really is that brown

 

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (ideally you should go out and buy the paper) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Birmingham Hippodrome on Tuesday 27 June 2017.


Welsh National Opera has been doing some interesting things this year, but in the Second City it’s mostly been Puccini revivals. To say we’ve seen this all before is an understatement: Joachim Herz’s production of Madam Butterfly is nearly 40 years old, though to be fair Reinhart Zimmermann’s designs – with their hanging cherry blossom and little wood and paper house – have aged well. It’s only the tie-dye drapes and preponderance of the colour brown (it’s all very Habitat) that make you realise this production dates from 1978.

And of course each new cast, conductor and revival director (Sarah Crisp on this occasion) has the potential to breathe new life into it. The staging’s telling little details – Trouble’s toy lighthouse, the ugly locks that Pinkerton has fitted to the delicate-looking house in Act 2 – were matched by vivid, detailed performances: Rebecca Afonwy-Jones’s calm, compassionate Suzuki, and David Kempster, as a gruff, warm-toned Sharpless, wagging his finger in warning as he tries to make Pinkerton do the decent thing. As Pinkerton, Paul Charles Clarke was determinedly oafish. His hard-edged, blustery singing and the way he let the cowardice flash across his face won him a chorus of pantomime-baddie boos.

But of course there’s no Butterfly without Cio-Cio-San, and Linda Richardson had it all: unsinkable assurance shading into heart-breaking fragility and (at the end) chilling resolve, all conveyed in a voice that never stopped glowing – whether quiet and poised, or soaring above the orchestra at the climax of an Un Bel Di that really blazed. Andrew Greenwood conducted with red-blooded sweep, and the WNO Orchestra responded with a passion worthy of the only UK opera orchestra from which I’ve never heard a lacklustre performance.

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Review: WNO’s The Marriage of Figaro

19 Saturday Mar 2016

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Birmingham Hippodrome, Reviews, The Birmingham Post, The Marriage of Figaro, Welsh National Opera

WNO Figaro Countess

Elizabeth Watts & Mark Stone (Countess & Count Almaviva) – picture by Richard Hubert Smith

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (you should really go out and buy the paper!) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Birmingham Hippodrome on Wednesday 23 March, a sort of addendum to my Spectator review of the opening night in Cardiff a fortnight earlier. 


At the very end of The Marriage of Figaro, as the Almaviva household’s crazy day races towards its conclusion, the betrayed Countess declines her revenge and instead forgives her jealous, philandering husband. Done well, it’s one of the most poignant moments in all Mozart – in other words, in all of theatre.

In this new production from Welsh National Opera, it wasn’t just the great, compassionate glow that flooded from Lothar Koenigs’ orchestra that made the eyes well up. It wasn’t even Elizabeth Watts’s radiant singing as the Countess. It was the way Watts took the Count (Mark Stone) by the hand and for the first time in the whole evening, looked him in the eye. One little detail, a single moment of human contact – and yet one that summed up everything that made director Tobias Richter’s achievement so utterly glorious.

It fizzed. It sparkled. And with a near-ideal cast, everyone played joyously off each other. In David Stout’s witty, handsomely-sung Figaro and Anna Devin’s sunny, spirited Susanna, Richter had a central couple who were both entirely believable and enormous fun to be around. With her gawky movements and sweet but plangent tone, Naomi O’Connell’s Cherubino was the girl-crazy teenage boy to perfection.

As Basilio, Alan Oke rolled his r’s with deliciously pedantic relish, while Richard Wiegold’s Bartolo and Susan Bickley’s Marcellina managed the transition from pantomime baddies to doting parents with genuine charm. And under Richter’s direction, even the Count evoked sympathy, Stone’s features crumpling with the frustration and puzzlement of a man who’s essentially weak rather than bad.

Sue Blane’s colourful mock-Georgian costumes gave the whole thing the tiniest spice of artificiality – just enough to make it ping off the stage. And to hear the clarity and comic timing these singers brought to their lines (in Jeremy Sams’ translation), with an audience laughing in real time, was a vindication of WNO artistic director David Pountney’s decision to have it sung in English. Ralph Koltai’s semi-abstract sets won’t have been to all tastes, but they focused attention on what really mattered: the warmth of the human comedy unfolding beneath them, and some of the freshest singing and acting you could possibly hope for. In short, if you get a chance to see this production, take it. It’s basically perfect.

Welsh National Opera in Birmingham: Bizet and Rossini

27 Thursday Nov 2014

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Birmingham Hippodrome, Birmingham Post, Bizet, Carmen, David Pountney, Moses in Egypt, Rossini, Welsh National Opera, William Tell

A bit closer to the present, my Birmingham Post reviews of all three operas in WNO‘s week-long autumn season in Birmingham are now online: the company’s basic (and now rather elderly) production of Carmen, and David Pountney’s new productions of Rossini’s Moses in Egypt and William Tell. (Ignore the strange single-sentence paragraphs; it’s editorial policy at the Post).

williamtell_660x378_08

Act 3 of Rossini’s William Tell: X-Men meets Patrice Chereau in David Pountney’s new WNO production.

Three overnight reviews in four days is the sort of stint that makes you feel your age; still, Birmingham is shamefully under-served for serious opera and I never miss a WNO production if I can help it. All of these were worth the trip; yet interestingly, while William Tell was undoubtedly the most satisfying overall theatrical experience, it’s Dal tuo stellato soglio, the great Act 3 prayer from Moses in Egypt, that still seems to be playing non-stop on my mental jukebox…

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