Nigel Wilkinson
Nigel has attended regularly, in Paris and elsewhere, for over 40 years. His focus is more on live, staged opera, warts and all, than recordings. His reports, which started as an aide-mémoire but were soon shared with friends and eventually became a blog, aim to encapsulate the unique experience, warts and all, of an ordinary, paying opera-goer. His other interests include travel, food and friendships, and he collects art by (mostly) young artists from around the world. UK-born and a graduate of Trinity College Cambridge, he has lived and worked in Iran and Turkey, but settled in Paris and, Brexit oblige, is now French.
An excellent Věc Makropulos at Opéra de Lille makes the case for the vitality and necessity of France’s regional companies.
Marina Rebeka comes tantalizingly close to triumph in Cherubini’s Médée at Théâtre des Champs Elysées.
La Monnaie’s flamboyantly busy new production of Benvenuto Cellini reads more burlesque than Berlioz.
Das Wunder der Heliane fuses sex with the sacred at a simmering performance at the Opéra National du Rhin.
With Siegfried, the directorial vision of the Paris Opera‘s Ring cycle finally takes root.
“When there’s so much to get right, unsurprisingly a lot can and, as we all know, does go wrong.”
Fine music-making meets a clunker of a production in La Monnaie‘s revival of Norma
Théâtre de l’Athénée Louis-Jouvet mounts a raucous production of Hervé’s Le petit Faust.
Offenbach‘s Robinson Crusoé is salvaged from obscurity.
Tamara Wilson and Stanislas de Barbeyrac are the standouts in Calixto Bieito’s underwhelming Die Walküre in Paris
Only the singers, led by Benjamin Bernheim, can salvage a dismal La Damnation de Faust at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées.
Shirin Neshat‘s Aïda in Paris is a typical instance of what happens when an artist is brought in to direct an opera.
Dmitry Matvienko led a performance of Mussorgsky and Shostakovich at La Monnaie with meticulous rectitude.
Les Brigands at the Paris Opera is an expensive joke that never lands
Carmen in Brussels is dramatically vibrant, if vocally stretched
Krzysztof Warlikowski‘s Der Rosenkavalier at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées surpasses even Nigel Wilkinson‘s high ‘WTF threshhold’
A double bill of rare Bizet works in Paris is not something any of us needs to do more than once
Asmik Grigorian’s scorching turn in Il trittico in Paris has Nigel Wilkinson wondering, ‘what is it that makes Americans so weepy?’
Félix Fourdrain‘s “féerie” Les Contes de Perrault by the Frivolités Parisiennes is as fun for adults as it is for children
Don Carlos returns to the Opéra National de Paris and it’s an unusually happy occasion
Pascal Dusapin‘s dynamic and demanding traversal of Dante‘s Commedia arrives at the Paris Opera
Back to Rameau again this week with Samson at the Opéra Comique, my third Rameau production in as little as three months, after Les Fêtes d’Hébé in the same house, and Castor et Pollux at the Palais Garnier.
This performance of Mahler’s Symphony N°8 at the Bozar in Brussels will probably be my last ever Mahler concert.
Some of my blog‘s habitués (they do exist) will know that I sometimes quote the people around me at the opera.
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
