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Luisa Miller, Verdi
C: Alexander Joel
LUISA MILLER, COLISEUM

English National Opera’s cast and conductor serve Luisa Miller well. Alexander Joel, having previously conducted it in Braunschweig and Hamburg, knows all its beauties and qualities and brilliantly makes the best possible case for it. He is a maestro totally at home in the opera pit. And leading the cast irresistibly, Korean tenor David Junghoon Kim as Rodolfo sang and acted thrillingly – with excellent singing too from James Creswell’s Count Walter and the towering Soloman Howard as the Count’s agent Wurm, outstanding bass voices impeccably deployed.

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16 Februar 2020criticscircle.org.ukTom Sutcliffe
Luisa Miller review: Neglected work brought back to passionate life

Alexander Joel’s fine conducting, sensitive to the ebb and flow of Verdi’s paragraphs and moulding them into potent enactments of human conflict, makes the strongest possible case for the work in this new ENO production. He is aided by some outstanding singing: Elizabeth Llewellyn brings a warm, generous tone and touching empathy to the title role, while David Junghoon Kim, a recent Jette Parker Young Artist, adds another triumph to his early-career successes with a confident, impassioned Rodolfo.

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17 Februar 2020www.standard.co.ukBarry Millington
Il barbiere di Siviglia, Rossini
D: Annabel Arden
C: Alexander Joel
The soloists and music surpass the acrobats

Malmö Opera almost never hires Swedish singers in leading roles, but instead seeks out the international market. In the new set of Rossini's Barber in Seville , we meet a Figaro from Lithuania, an Almaviva from South Africa, a Rosina from Germany, a Bartolo from Italy and a Basilio from Greece. The Swedish colors are defended by the young Elin Eriksson in the small role as Berta (and she does well).

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13 Februar 2022www.aftonbladet.seLennart Bromander
Carmen, Bizet
D: Francesca Zambello
C: Bertrand de BillyAlexander Joel
A workmanlike Carmen at the Royal Opera

In the title role, Elena Maximova disappointed. She has the looks and moves for the part, power to burn and the right sort of dark colour in the voice. But a thick accent was allied to awful diction, with hardly a consonant intelligible all evening. I spent the evening struggling to work out the words from a combination of memory and back-translation of the surtitles, and that kills any possibility of being swept away by siren-like sexuality, which is required to make the whole opera plausible. Just like the singing, the orchestral performance was mixed. Bertrand de Billy kept things moving nicely and strings and woodwind gave good, precise performances: the prelude to Act III, when they’re playing on their own, was the orchestral highlight of the evening. But there were simply too many errors and hesitancies in brass and percussion: this is a score where anything less than immaculate timing of triangle or tambourine notes can throw the whole flow of the music. The result was an orchestral performance that was adequate without ever touching greatness. Zambello’s staging is appealing: her take on 19th century Seville is well lit and bustling, very much one’s ideal of a Hispanic city in the burning sun gathered from Zorro movies or elsewhere. But it gives a lot of rope on which a revival director can hang himself: there is a huge amount of movement on stage and it all needs to be executed crisply. Under the revival direction of Duncan Macfarland and choreography of Sirena Tocco, last night’s cast and chorus were good enough to execute it all correctly, but not good enough to give the sense of doing so with abandon. The defining example was extras abseiling down the walls, who landed with care rather than with a thump and a flourish; the exception was the Royal Opera Youth Company, with the children throwing themselves into the action with delightful abandon and brio. For anyone seeing Carmen for the first time, this production will have been a more than satisfactory evening. Old hands hoping to see something extra will find it in Hymel and Car, but not elsewhere.

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20 Oktober 2015bachtrack.comDavid Karlin

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