Nigel Wilkinson
Nigel has attended opera 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.
I decided I’d take ‘never made it to the Met’ as an excuse to submit a post about why French soprano Denise Duval (1921-2015) is special to me.
Iain Bell and Lydia Steier‘s Medusa stuns in Brussels.
An exciting cast digs their claws into a heady production of La Calisto at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées.
Led by a mesmerizing Anthony Roth Costanzo, Satyagraha at the Paris Opera dispenses with historical particularities for something for more elusive.
Calixto Bieito‘s production of Idomeneo at La Monnaie is anchored by a committed cast, but gets swept up in pseudo-psychoanalytic imagery — and foot fetishism.
Kent Nagano gives a boost to the Opéra national de Paris‘s revival of Nixon in China.
Matthias Pintscher’s Nuit sans aube at the Opéra Comique conjures up plenty of atmosphere — but not much else.
The Ralph Fiennes production of Eugene Onegin at the Paris Opera is just…fine.
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’
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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