Jonathan Lennie

London is one of the world centres of classical music, and there’s a staggering number of concerts, recitals, festivals and lunchtime services taking place in the capital every month. Our advice? Head to any of the shows recommended below and you’ll be in for a treat.

Before the lights dim, church bells begin tolling and, through a scrim, three live sheep are shepherded across the stage. This is not some bucolic Handel romp: Hildegard Bechtler’s stage set is the drawing room of an art deco mansion, and this scene is a prelude to two hours in which we witness the moral disintegration of the aristocracy. Based on the 1962 film ‘The Exterminating Angel’ by Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel, this British premiere from composer Thomas Adès and his librettist Tom Cairns (who also directs) depicts the increasingly debauched events that unfold when dinner-party guests are inexplicably trapped in a room overnight and beyond. Even their repeat arrival is faithfully re-enacted, along with a floating hand and the presence of a bear, recreating the absurdist tone of the original. Adès’s imaginative score, which employs diverse influences from across the centuries, is rich, well orchestrated and, at turns, jarring, intense and very loud. The large orchestra, conducted powerfully by the composer, includes grand piano (mimed onstage by the disturbingly unhinged Blanca – mezzo Christine Rice) and off-stage percussion. The musical spirit of titular Angel (an existential force of inaction) is represented by the haunting sound of the ondes Martenot (a Theremin-like keyboard instrument), while thundering drums pound through an interlude after Act 1, setting the mood for the moral dissolution to follow. While the vocal writing for the sopranos is very high, spiky

This new production of ‘The Mastersingers of Nuremberg’, Wagner’s glorious four-and-a-half-hour comic opera extolling the art of German vocal music, is the final one from The Royal Opera’s outgoing director of opera, Kasper Holten. With nothing to lose, one might expect either a full-on avant-garde wigout or ultra-traditional final roll of the dice, but the Danish director offers both and neither, eschewing the opera’s sixteenth-century world without replacing it with a coherent alternative. Holten focuses his attention on the sexism of the plot from the beginning, with cross-dressed, moustachioed women joining the men as the excellent ROH chorus opens proceedings in a 1930s-style wooden-stepped guildhall, a gentlemen-only members’ club for mastersingers. Meanwhile, Eva tries on her wedding dress, seated on a large trophy-shaped chair – she is to be the prize in a competition run by her father Pogner (a dignified performance from bass Stephen Milling). So far, so good. However, this attractive set by Mia Stensgaard does not change for the entirety of the opera; and while Anja Vang Kragh’s livery costumes for the mastersingers are sumptuous, their white tie and tails could work as an updated motif, except it makes no sense in act two with shoemaker Hans Sachs working at a formal dining table in his dinner suit. That aside, act three then gets a bit post-modern and we find the principals lounging around, apparently backstage while waiting to appear, distancing us from their cha

I should confess I was hoping for a more modern text as a vehicle for acclaimed composer Ryan Wigglesworth’s debut opera, and considered the choice of Shakespeare’s late problem play as inauspicious. But in this world premiere from the English National Opera (ENO), the composer’s stunning score – combined with fine singing and intelligent direction from Rory Kinnear – produces compelling entertainment. A feature of ENO’s modus operandi has been to regularly invite non-opera personnel to oversee productions. In this case, acclaimed Shakespearean actor Kinnear brings his sense of theatre to his directorial debut, peopling the stage in natural tableaux and drawing realistic interactions from the cast, not to mention throwing in the odd theatrical coup. In this modern-dress production the kingdoms of Sicily and Bohemia are late-twentieth-century Eastern European dictatorships, where burly bass-baritone Iain Paterson is an intimidating presence as the insanely jealous King Leontes, whose belief in his wife’s adultery sets events in motion. Baritone Leigh Melrose makes a convincing Polixenes, switching effortlessly from fearful, accused friend to military ruler and angry father, while his lovestruck son Florizel is played with youthful charm by Anthony Gregory.  The female voices shine the most, both in their own right and in contrast to the predominantly deep orchestral textures. As Hermione, soprano Sophie Bevan is the highlight, her perfect intonation soars into the ether as Leo

In George Enescu’s version of ‘Oedipe’, the Romanian composer has created a gloriously lyrical score to tell the tragic Greek myth. It glows in late-Romantic colour, inflections of his native folk music and modernist flourishes. Proceedings open pleasingly as the image projected onto the safety curtain is repeated onstage. Alfons Flores’s design offers 20 boxes, four tiers high, filled with traditional Theban characters, all caked with clay. At its centre, a bearded King Laius (solid bass Hubert Francis) proudly holds his baby Oedipus, before superb bass John Tomlinson, as blind soothsayer Tiresias, arrives to spoil the party with the revelation that the baby will grow to kill his father and marry his mother. The production comes courtesy of Catalan theatrical team La Fura dels Baus, whose directors Alex Ollé and Valentina Carrasco excel with the beautiful and timeless – the act one tableau and act four heavenly shrine especially – but falter when they introduce gimmicky modernity – act three’s high-visibility-jacketed Shepherd (tenor Alan Oke) and dismal, modern plague crisis centre in which boiler-suited medics in gas masks attend to the dead and dying.  Leo Hussain conducts with aplomb, maintaining a stately tempo appropriate for this regal tale, allowing room for the details and singers to shine. In the marathon title role, bass-baritone Johan Reuter struggles at times to be heard over chorus and orchestra. The star, however, is surely Tomlinson, whose Tiresias is grippin

It was clearly a man’s world in Tsarist Russia, if Mussorgsky’s 1869 masterpiece ‘Boris Godunov’ is accurate. Of 15 principal singers, only three are women and even they have minor roles. That coupled with an almost exclusively male chorus creates a claustrophobic, masculine milieu for this tale without a love interest based on the play by Alexander Pushkin. This testosterone-fuelled environment is anchored in bass-baritone Bryn Terfel who gives a stunning debut in the title role of the tormented Tsar in a near perfect production. It may be nearly half an hour before the guilt-ridden ruler sings, but his descent from ambitious tyrant to shambling wreck is enthralling. Boris’s guilt is a result of having ordered the murder of Dmitri, the eight-year-old heir to the throne in order to secure the position for himself. Under Richard Jones’s superb direction the murder by black-clad assassins is enacted many times in the bright gallery above the stage, as the boy plays with a spinning top; a brutal event playing out endlessly in the tortured mind of the new ruler. Miriam Beuther’s other designs are simple but effective – a vaulted room clad in a repeating Kremlin Bell motif, with a door on either side, and above, a brightly wall-papered gallery depicting the corridor outside those doors. Too many fine individual performances to mention them all, but there are stand-out performances from statuesque Estonian bass Ain Anger as Pimen, a monk with the presence of an Old Testament prophe

It is always a thrill when the singer in an opera’s title role delivers the goods. This is most certainly the case with soprano Marjorie Owens, who turns in an extraordinary performance as Norma, the druid priestess of Bellini’s 1831 opera. The American singer quickly warms to her part, demonstrating rock-solid technique, power, smoothness and exquisite control; her showcase aria ‘Casta Diva’ (‘Virgin Goddess’ in George Hall’s clear English translation) produced with such restraint and beauty that the audience is immediately won over. This is ENO’s first production of the work and Owens is ably supported by tenor Peter Auty as her illicit Roman lover Pollione – a strong lyric tenor, who, while not as naturally flexible as Owens, shows remarkable stamina as he copes admirably with the extended arias and soaring cabalettas. Other strong performances come from American bass James Creswell as Oroveso (Norma’s father and druid leader), a strong singer, but one who held the stage for most of the performance in silence as a burly, brooding woodcutter. Meanwhile, mezzo-soprano Jennifer Holloway is sympathetic as Adalgisa, Pollione’s bit on the side. The action takes place in Adam Silverman’s starkly lit set, in which designer Charles Edwards presents a full-stage wood-panelled shed, housing a huge tree trunk that had been stripped and adorned with runes. This device stands for both Irminsul, the goddess of the woods whom these druids worship, and a clearly phallic totem, which direct

It's probably something of an indictment when the best bits of an opera aren't original but added by its director. Such is the case with Mariame Clément’s production of ‘L’étoile’ (The Star) by late-nineteenth-century French composer Emmanuel Chabrier. And Clément’s contrivances begin immediately with the appearance during the overture of two actors playing a pair of commentating toffs, one French, the other Chris Addison – the comedian and ‘The Thick of It’ star, whom many had come specifically to see. Ironically, it was their comic interventions that raised most of the laughs, leaving the rest of Chabrier’s opéra bouffe to flounder in its delightful but forgettable music, post-modern satirising of its genre and absurd, inconsequential plot. While diverting, the fourth-wall violations by Addison and Jean-Luc Vincent to explain this incomprehensible French-language drama for the benefit of the English-speaking audience produced the effect of dragging out the spoken dialogue, while Vincent’s deliberately thick French accent got in the way of elucidating a paper-thin plot concerning a king seeking an execution victim for his birthday. This, of course, immediately creates associations with Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘The Mikado’. However, the British duo never produced a libretto as lame as this nor set it to music as pretentiously in grand-opera style as Chabrier. And while the sumptuous varied orchestration is very listenable, it promises something more substantial on stage: with

Georg Friederich Haas does not deal in the business of traditional plot-driven opera. His latest ‘Morning and Evening’ sets a narrative that can be explained in a sentence – ‘A man is born and, in a moment, he is dead.’ The dramatically austere, but musically compelling 90 minutes, deals with the birth of fisherman Johannes and the slow acceptance of his new post-mortal condition; the principal characters in his life each playing a role in his crossing over – distressed daughter Signe, nostalgic wife Erna and fishing friend Peter. The libretto by Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse is startlingly spare, and while lacking the morbid wit of, say Samuel Beckett, it remains engaging as the inevitability of the end draws on. Graham Vick directs sensitively, the characters display no histrionics, just puzzlement and calm elucidation.  Though beautifully lit by Giuseppe di Iorio, the monochrome costumes and set (Richard Hudson) immediately give the game away and one wonders if the production might have benefitted by some ambiguity as to Johannes’s situation, easily achieved by a less-obvious ethereal pallet, or if the whole thing might not be better presented as an oratorio. The characters are distinctly depicted, baritone Christoph Poul believable as the bewildered Johannes, with strong support from Will Hartmann as Peter, Helena Rasker as Johannes’s wife Erna and sweetly controlled singing in the upper register from soprano Sarah Wegener as Signe. The opening speech from actor Klaus Ma

The Royal Opera House returns to the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in an attempt to recapture the wonder that was last year's 'L'Ormindo', a beautiful production of the exquisite early Baroque opera by Venetian master Francesco Cavalli. While much of that production's grandeur is repeated - the intimate Jacobean-style theatre lit only by candlelight, the excellent Orchestra of the Early Opera Company directed by harpsichordist Christian Curnyn, and a work from 1647 by another Italian - unfortunately, there is a reason we haven't heard of composer Luigi Rossi. Rossi's turgid 'Orpheus' retains only the harmonic gloss of Cavalli, but none of the melodies. The story, too, concocted by his librettist Francesco Buti, is a convoluted take on the Orpheus myth, in which the famous titular musician has a rival (Aristeus) for his wife, the ill-fated Eurydice. Meanwhile, the gods - Venus, Cupid, Jove, Bacchus, Pluto and The Three Graces - each have their own agendas and meddle in the affair, with pripaic contributions from a Satyr. The result is an overcrowded stage and a befuddled plot, of which the attempted rescue of Eurydice from the Underworld is a mere sideshow rather than the climax of the tale. This is not to say that there are not moments of invention in this period costume, English-language version. Keith Warner directs the confection with enthusiasm, utilising every possible entrance and exit to accommodate the stage traffic, with plenty of coy interaction with the audience. There i

Australian director Benedict Andrews may be something in the theatre world. However, a determination to impose his idiosyncratic style seems out of place in this contemporary setting of Puccini’s masterpiece for ENO. The result is a crude and, ultimately, unengaging. The first act of ‘La Bohème’ is unrivalled in opera for its glorious sequence of arias and duets, as timid Mimì comes in search of a light for her candle and finds Rodolfo, her future lover. Only an opera-phobe would disrupt this romantic union with a vulgar scenario in which the hipster poet is about to jack up on heroin when his neighbour arrives, promptly falls for this smack-head and allows him to inject her, the pair then rolling about on the floor for the reminder of the scene. Such sensational distraction might be forgiven if the drugs storyline were maintained, rather than fizzling out, with a coughing Mimì succumbing to the tuberculosis as in the original. Meanwhile, the contemporary updating is littered with anachronisms, such as the boys having a landlord in search of rent, but no heating or electricity, and Colline (a philosopher!) paying for medicine by selling his overcoat (to whom?). The singing is mixed. As Mimì, Corinne Winters brings rich colour to a strong vocal performance, while Zach Borichevsky (Rodolfo) possesses a true lyric tenor but is wobbly at the top. As Musetta, soprano Rhian Lois is underpowered and rather inconspicuous during her show aria ‘When I Walk’. The other bohemians Ashley

This review is of 'The Importance of Being Earnest's 2013 run at the Royal Opera House It is rare to attend what is clearly a contemporary musical masterpiece – a startlingly original and genuinely amusing modern opera, given here by a talented cast of singers and musicians. Even the music is funny – megaphones, smashing plates, a pastiche of twentieth-century avant-garde styles, including ridiculous vocal intervals and faux serialism – all from the brilliantly inventive mind of Irish composer Gerald Barry.  Of course, Oscar Wilde had a hand in it too, but the laughs in this opera lie in the dislocated, absurdist take on the original play – Wilde’s definitive drawing-room-based comedy of manners. Not only does the score contain impromptu vocal variations on Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ and the recurring theme of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, but Barry’s script-editing deliberately leaves certain sentences unfinished. Such an ironic take on the original, however, is also the problem with the piece. Barry’s treatment renders the opera incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with the play. And surely such a madcap, modern scoring deserves to be balanced by a more grounded production to point up the disparity between the effete and formal Victoriana, on which it is based, and the actual reductio ad absurdum of its remake. But with the minimal designs by Ben Clark – a gently rising, stage-wide flight of low steps bearing vases of flowers – and harsh lighting, it is hard to see what Barry is sending