Intermezzo

let the sales begin - Hansel & Gretel and Lucrezia Borgia more than 50% off

At last - a children's opera you can afford to take the kids to. A Travelzoo offer on the Royal Opera House's Hansel & Gretel cuts prices on amphitheatre seats from £22.50-£28 to £18 and stalls seats from £97-£115 to £40. It's valid for performances on Friday, 31 December, at 12.30pm; Monday, 3 January, at 7.30pm; Tuesday, 4 January, at 7.30pm and Friday, 7 January, at 7.30pm.

Tickets must be booked by 17 December on this link only.

And the inevitable reductions on ENO's new Lucrezia Borgia begin with dress circle tickets for most dates reduced to £25 via the Get Into London Theatre scheme.

Hansel and Gretel slashed

 

It hasn't even opened yet, but already the Royal Opera House have waved the magic discounting wand over Hansel and Gretel.

Via the Official London Theatre Guide, stalls seats are reduced from £102-£115 to £60 and amphitheatre from £48 to £30 for shows on Friday 31 December at 12:30, Saturday 1 January at 18:00 and Tuesday 4 January at 19:30.

Book online via the special link or by phone quoting 'SOLT fairytale opera offer'.

(thanks Werner for the tip)

Glyndebourne's Hansel and Gretel at the Proms

Prom 61: Hänsel and Gretel - LPO / Robin Ticciati - Royal Albert Hall, 31 August 2010

Glyndebourne's annual excursion to South Ken gets more elaborate each year. Only the attenuated but ingeniously rethought sets (the highlight - an Albert Hall-shaped gingerbread house) separated this semi-staging from a full performance. We even got a bonus on-trend immersive experience as the Father (William Dazely) made his entrance through the promming throng in the arena, dumping his carrier bags with a percussionist before clambering on to the raised stage behind the orchestra.

Who's the talented one now?

From the BBC website - the cast list for the Xmas day broadcast of the Royal Opera House's Hänsel und Gretel:

Fortunately, 'participant' Sir Colin is handier with a baton than Katie Derham:

Grimm truths from the Daily Mail

 

Is the Royal Opera House's new Hänsel und Gretel "Magical, yes. Scary, no" or "terrifying"? The Daily Mail can't make up its mind, so it ran two diametrically opposed stories. Who would have thought they were so liberal?

No surprise that Daily Mail readers have ignored the first piece and lavished their commenting insights on the second, which claims "The two-hour fairytale features lust-crazed parents, a knife-wielding wicked witch who hangs children in her larder before baking them in a giant oven and a final scene of cannibalism in which children feast on her flesh".

"Unbelievable that these morons can hold sway and produce such appalling stuff in this age of burgeoning sickos" claims a reader. From Canada.

Nothing scarier than a Daily Mail comments box.

A Christmas present from the Royal Opera House - watch Hänsel und Gretel online

Banksy

A welcome confluence of circumstance. 

A BBC2 broadcast of Covent Garden's Hänsel und Gretel sometime over the Christmas period (date not yet known), plus the start of live online streaming for BBC1 and BBC2, means that you should be able to watch Hänsel und Gretel online.

Depending on which performance they choose to film, the cast includes Angelika Kirchschlager and Diana Damrau, or Alice Coote and Camilla Tilling as the children, with Thomas Allen or Eike Wilm Schulte and Anja Silja or Ann Murray in support. Colin Davis (in possibly his last ROH show) or Robin Ticciati conduct.

The Royal Opera House website may have further information on its TV page here at some point.

Opera for all - the Royal Opera House at the cinema this year

Below is a list of Royal Opera House productions and co-productions currently expected (*subject to change*) to show at UK cinemas over the coming year.

The Empire chain and the Vue chain are both involved, but specific locations will vary for each production. The full list of cinemas participating in the first screening can now be found on the Royal Opera House website, and I assume details for the later ones will be added in due course.

As a price guide, the Empire Leicester Square is charging £20 for the first screening, and the Vue Islington £15. I gather demand is not expected to be high - both are showing in their most bijou of auditoria. 

Live where marked; reheated sloppy seconds if not:

28th SEPTEMBER 2008 UN BALLO IN MASCHERA, Madrid live

Production by Mario Martone. Starring Marcelo Alvarez, Violeta Urmana, Carlos Alvarez, Elena Zaremba, and Alessandra Marianelli. Conductor Jesus Lopez Cobos.

26th OCTOBER 2008 TAMERLANO, Madrid

Paul McCreesh conducts Graham Vick’s production of Tamerlano. Plácido Domingo heads the cast, alongside Monica Bacelli, Ann Hallenberg, Isabel Rey, Sara Mingardo and Patricia Bardon.

9th NOVEMBER 2008 WAR REQUIEM, Royal Albert Hall live

Antonio Pappano conducts Christine Brewer, Ian Bostridge, Thomas Hampson in a concert performance at the Royal Albert Hall, 2 days before the Armistice Day 90th anniversary.

16th DECEMBER 2008 HANSEL & GRETEL, Royal Opera House live

Sir Colin Davis conducts a new production by Moshe Leiser & Patrice Caurier. The cast includes Diana Damrau, Angelika Kirchschlager, Thomas Allen, Anja Silja, and Elizabeth Connell.

1st FEBRUARY 2009 CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA & PAGLIACCI, Teatro Real, Madrid

Giancarlo del Monaco’s production stars Violetta Urmana, Vincenzo La Scola, Vladimir Galouzine and Maria Bay. Conductor Jesus Lopez Cobos.

22nd FEBRUARY 2009 AIDA, Gran Teatre de Liceu, Barcelona

Filmed in 2003 against the historic paper trompe-l’oeil sets painted between 1936 and 1945 by Josep Mestres Cabanes. Performers include Daniela Dessi, Fabio Armiliato, Roberto Scandiuzzi and Juan Pons, conducted by Miguel Angel Gomez Martinez.

29th MARCH 2009 CARMEN, Royal Opera House

Francesca Zambello’s production. Starring Anna Caterina Antonacci, Jonas Kaufmann, Ildebrando D’Arcangelo and Norah Amsellem. Conductor Antonio Pappano.

3rd MAY 2009 DON CARLO, Royal Opera House

Production by Nicholas Hynter with Rolando Villazón, Marina Poplavskaya, Ferruccio Furlanetto, Simon Keenlyside, Sonia Ganassi, Robert Lloyd. Conducted by Antonio Pappano.

30th MAY 2009 LA TRAVIATA, Royal Opera House live

Renée Fleming, Joseph Calleja and Thomas Hampson in a revival of Richard Eyre's production. Conductor: Antonio Pappano.

No gingerbread for Hansel and Gretel at the Met

Hansel and Gretel - Metropolitan Opera, New York, 8 January 2007

Outside the Met before the show

There've been complaints from critics that this production is too scary, not sugary enough to bring the kids to. (Not quite as scary as the $3,550 (=£1,800) the Met wants you to pay for family tickets and a bed for the night though.) The sprinkling of children in my area of the audience seemed riveted, not at all perturbed. In truth I could see little that would bother any but those who are too young for a full night out at the opera anyway. The central themes of starvation and cannibalism (seasoned with child abuse and wife beating) are handled with engaging restraint. I did overhear some grannies on the way out who felt short-changed by the lack of a gingerbread house and a forest. It's probably this generation, who've perhaps seen a more literal take before, who are most likely to feel disappointed. But I've avoided it in the past for precisely the opposite reason, so this was my very first Hansel and Gretel.

It's immediately recognisable as a Richard Jones production from the shoebox set and sixties decor unveiled for the first act. The set, a dilapidated kitchen, is cleverly constructed so that it's higher and wider at the front than the back. This lends a surreal, unsettling depth to the visual, and makes the performers at the rear of the stage (the parents) seem suitably larger than the ones at the front (the children, played of course by adults). Manic movement compensated for the rather opaque written characterisations. Alice Coote presented Hansel as a typically boisterous small boy, charging around bull-headed, and Christine Schäfer's Gretel was a sweet and bashful little girl. The action (and there's lots of it) is precision-choreographed. Having recently seen rather too many Wagnerians shuffling cluelessly around the stage like sheepish auditionees, it was a delight to see some proper stage blocking for a change.

Although this production is in English, Coote and Schäfer's slurry diction made me grateful for the Met's seat-back subtitles (seatitles?). The problem was shared, to a lesser extent, by the rest of the cast. But then this is the case with so many English-language productions I've seen (like, just about everything at the ENO) that I have to wonder if it's a problem with the language itself as much as the singers. Especially for sopranos, it's tough to get the syllables across cleanly.

The second act is set in another expanding box, this one taller and more threatening, its forest setting evoked by dark leafy wallpaper and a tree branch chandelier.

Nodding trees around the sides are revealed as actors in uncomfortable headgear, and there are more actors, grotesque chefs who advance to set the giant banqueting table in the children's dream sequence, and a bizarre fish-headed waiter who rises out of the floor. Sasha Cooke (a slightly scary old-guy Sandman) and Lisette Oropesa (the Dew Fairy) get some of the prettiest music in the opera, and delivered really charming cameos here.

The third act began not with the expected gingerbread house, but with a giant cake-bearing mouth that led in to the witch's kitchen, a huge food factory complete with enormous oven. Due to illness, the scheduled Witch, Philip Langridge, was replaced by Adam Klein. Prosthetically tubbified, he delivered such an appropriately beguiling performance that I didn't miss Langridge at all.

The visuals are so breathtaking and consistently engaging that the music could almost take a back seat. But Vladimir Jurowski conducted the Met orchestra (sounding considerably more vigorous than they had in the previous night's Die Walküre) with a drive and attention to detail that underlined that this is not the glorified panto some might like it to be.

Courtesy of Welsh National Opera, who originally commissioned it, this production (different cast) can be seen in Cardiff and Birmingham this summer.

 

Mr and Mrs Jurowski and the kids: