Antonín Karas News
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2024-04-25
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2023-11-13 07:42:00
Plenty of food for thought & some terrific singing: Oliver Mears' staging of Handel's Jephtha at the Royal Opera with a towering performance from Allan Clayton in the title role
[…] stasis.Handel: Jephtha - the Ammonites in Act OneRoyal Opera House (Photo: Marc Brenner)It was thus with great interest that we caught the second performance of Oliver Mears' new production of Handel's Jephtha at the Royal Opera House. Laurence Cummings conducted the orchestra of the Royal Opera House with Allan Clayton as Jephtha, Alice Coote as Storge, Jennifer France as Iphis, Cameron Shahbazi as Hamor, and Brindley Sherratt as Zebul. Sets were by Simon Lima Holdsworth, costumes by Ilona Karas, video by Sander Loonen, lighting by Fabiana Piccioli and movement by Anna Morrissey. In fact, Mears was working with the same team as his production of Verdi's Rigoletto.Holdsworth's sets were based around two massive stone panels with writing on them, these moved, reconfiguring the space so that the more intimate scenes were far more acoustically sympathetic, but the big visual coup was that as well as the Israelites we saw their enemies, the Ammonites. […]
2022-03-10 08:30:56
Anglais - Oliver Mears’s Rigoletto Finds its Stride at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
[…] the revival director, it becomes easier to appreciate how a more understated approach works in its own right. This is attributable to many factors, but chief among them are the qualities of the cast. The performers last time around were undoubtedly good, but the current crop feature some exceptional voices and make their presence felt in a variety of ways. This is especially important because the setting for the action is quite unspecific, with Ilona Karas’s costumes covering both the sixteenth century and modern day, and the Duke owning Titian’s ‘Venus of Urbino’ and ‘The Rape of Europa’ but seemingly as a latter day art collector. The lack of a single clear context in which the action plays out can encourage emotions to be explored in the abstract, but there is so much knowing detail in the current performances that the characters’ feelings certainly do come across. In this way, […]
2021-09-14 12:30:01
Royal opera House Rigoletto review – Oropesa is a matchless Gilda; this is one of the truly great performances
Royal Opera House, LondonOliver Mears’s striking staging posits a Mantua united by misogyny and violence and boasts a terrific cast, with Lisette Oropesa truly outstanding With full audiences returning to Covent Garden for the first time since March 2020, the Royal Opera opens its season with a new Rigoletto, conducted by Antonio Pappano and directed by Oliver Mears, his first staging for the company since his appointment as director of opera in 2017. It’s a powerful piece of theatre, strong on Shakespearean resonances and irony: we’re reminded more than once that Rigoletto is the closest we get to the King Lear that Verdi always said he wanted to write but never did. Mears’s Mantua is a place of sandstone walls and louring grey skies, where opulence and squalor exist side by side. Ilona Karas’s costumes, though non-specific as to period, suggest the 1980s, and the ducal court, got up in New […]
2020-07-30 04:52:00
From Holland with Love (CD review)
[…] old Vienna Johann Strauss Orchestra, the conductor-violinist directs vigorous, lusty, sometimes boisterous, always zesty, and ultimately joyous performances of waltzes and polkas by the Strausses, Lehar, Gruber, and others. Andre Rieu However, I wasn't instantly won over. During the first few selections I feared Rieu was only playing to the galleries, trying too hard to foist pop culture on the masses, commercializing and vulgarizing old favorites. His way with Anton Karas’s Third Man theme seemed to me especially romanticized, as did the opening selection, a medley of Strauss and colleagues' tunes. But I soon came to recognize Rieu's sincerity and joined in the spirit of the festivities. Evidently, the Strausses themselves had a high time with their music in concert and expected their listeners to do likewise. So, don't count on subtlety; Rieu plays for fun and merriment and hardly with subtlety or refinement. […]
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