English National Opera Presents Du Yin’s Groundbreaking Angel’s Bone at the London Coliseum

Angel’s Bone, by composer Du Yin and librettist Royce Vavrek, began life in 2011 as a 35-minute chamber opera that had been commissioned by Philadelphia’s Mann Center for Performing Arts. It was then developed into a full length (although still one act) opera, with the premiere of this 80-minute version taking place on 6 January 2016 at the 3LD Art & Technology Center in Lower Manhattan. The story sees two Angels, simply referred to as the Boy Angel and Girl Angel,...

Aida, the opera performed more often than any other at the Liceu, was chosen to open the present season. In that respect, then, there was nothing particularly new. The attraction of this opening-night Aida lay, on the one hand, in Anna Netrebko’s Liceu debut in a staged role and, on the other, in the new production, directed by the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat. This production wasoriginally created for the Salzburg Festival in 2017 and substantially revised by the director herself...

The story to be found in George Frideric Handel’s Alcina, which first appeared at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden in 1735, comes from Ludovico Ariosto’s epic sixteenth century poem Orlando furioso. It was employed for many operas, one of which was Riccardo Broschi’s L'isola di Alcina, which premiered in Rome in 1728. Handel acquired Antonio Fanzaglia’s libretto for it the following year during his travels in Italy, and that for his own opera was arranged by...

Few works are at once as light-hearted and as profound as Falstaff. Giuseppe Verdi chose to end his operatic career with a comedy when everyone was expecting another tragedy. Yet beneath the laughter lies a lucid reflection on old age, the passing of time, appearances and the human condition. The laughter in Falstaff is never superficial. Shakespeare, who created the character, had already mastered the art of blending the sublime with the grotesque, humour with melancholy, and Arrigo...

I puritani, with a libretto by Count Carlo Pepoli, was Vincenzo Bellini’s final opera, as he died just eight months after its premiere in January 1835. Based on Têtes Rondes et Cavaliers, an historical play by Jacques-François Ancelot and Joseph Xavier Saintine, it is set during the English Civil War, although the specific episode described is fictitious. In fact, the narrative was always intended to be a commentary on the political climate of 1830s Paris following the...

Even before the curtain rises, the overture to Le Nozze di Figaro begins, and at once the audience starts to experience a surge of happiness. There are very few pieces of music that so clearly and reliably promise to usher the spirit into a state of happiness; perhaps only the opening Allegro of Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony could be compared with it. Mendelssohn, like Mozart, was one of those composers who came into the world to make it a little more habitable and...