operat

The Marriage of Figaro review – Danielle de Niese’s slick direction weds finery with fun

Wild Arts Summer Opera festival, Layer Marney Tower, Essex A touring show was quite a challenge for the opera star’s first directorial gig, but dynamic singing, charismatic orchestral play and clever stage jokes pull it off brilliantly‘Four boxes, six screens, four chairs and a tree”: the sum total of scenery for Wild Arts’ new English-language production of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro is modest by operatic standards. This staging needs to travel light, since it’s destined for performances...

The Marriage of Figaro review – Danielle de Niese’s slick direction weds finery with fun

Wild Arts Summer Opera festival, Layer Marney Tower, Essex A touring show was quite a challenge for the opera star’s first directorial gig, but dynamic singing, charismatic orchestral play and clever stage jokes pull it off brilliantly‘Four boxes, six screens, four chairs and a tree”: the sum total of scenery for Wild Arts’ new English-language production of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro is modest by operatic standards. This staging needs to travel light, since it’s destined for performances...

If this is Messi’s last World Cup, could he eclipse Maradona and win it twice?

After living in the Argentina idol’s shadow, the 39-year-old star of Qatar is still capable of a final glorious chapterLionel Messi in Qatar felt like the perfect story. It was the great finale. He is doomed always to be compared with Diego Maradona and, placed alongside a life of operatic ups and downs, of injury and addiction, drugs bans and organised crime, the highest highs and the lowest lows, his narrative always seemed a little flat: a kid was good at football, and then was...

If this is Messi’s last World Cup, could he eclipse Maradona and win it twice?

After living in the Argentina idol’s shadow, the 39-year-old star of Qatar is still capable of a final glorious chapterLionel Messi in Qatar felt like the perfect story. It was the great finale. He is doomed always to be compared with Diego Maradona and, placed alongside a life of operatic ups and downs, of injury and addiction, drugs bans and organised crime, the highest highs and the lowest lows, his narrative always seemed a little flat: a kid was good at football, and then was...

Raphael Lets Loose

Plenty of faces keep you company in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Raphael: Sublime Poetry”—saints and sinners, popes and poets, ladies in posh frocks or nothing at all—but the most disarming is the first to greet you, that of a boy in a fun hat. With a long, straight nose; soft, bright eyes; and an uplifted chin, he carries the wary confidence of a teenage heartthrob. It isn’t just the face that makes you pause.

Nicolas Cage as the Green Goblin? It will always be one of Hollywood’s great might-have-beens

Nicolas Cage as the Green Goblin? It will always be one of Hollywood’s great might-have-beens

‘Really entertaining in a horrible way’: the indestructible appeal of Tosca

With its screams, sex, bells and bloodshed Puccini’s opera was initially derided as a noisy disaster. Ahead of Glyndebourne’s first ever production, we look the ‘shabby little shocker’ that’s become one of opera’s most bankable masterpiecesGustav Mahler hated it. Its publisher was convinced it would be a commercial disaster.

Never Call Retreat

We tend to think we have one national anthem, but to me, we have always seemed to have two. The first is the official one, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The second is “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”