Sondra Radvanovsky Archives - North West End UK

3Apr

By Mark DavorenNo Comments

REVIEWS

Turandot – Royal Opera House

In spite of the date, it was sadly no joke that due to technical issues with the transmission, we lost the majority of the opening act and just when everything was set for the final act to unfold, further issues saw us stutter through the opening of Nessun Dorma before a freeze and then a jump to the next scene. All of this combined with the fact that the wrong programme information was sent out gives great cause for concern when opera is striving to reinforce its audience and its future with a selected live performance transmitted globally – on this occasion to over one thousand cinemas in twenty-two countries. None of this is the fault of the creatives and cast and having seen the 2023 revival, that serves as a useful point of reference for me to review this 2025 revival in spite of t...

Andréa Chenier – Royal Opera House

David McVicar’s spectacular staging of Umberto Giordano’s epic verismo opera of revolution and forbidden love from 2015 is brought back to life by Revival Director Thomas Guthrie with the orchestra under the baton of Antonio Pappano in his last production as Music Director of The Royal Opera. At a glittering party in 18th-century Paris there are distinctly two tiers of society on display from the lowly footman Gérard (Amartuvshin Enkhbat) who follows in the footsteps of his father who has been in service for sixty years, to the sumptuous host, Contessa di Coigny (Rosalind Plowright), whose daughter Maddalena (Sondra Radvanovsky) straddles both as she eschews the fancy dress and faux manners in favour of intellectual discussion, so when the poet Andréa Chenier (Jonas Kaufmann) delivers a...

The Met Live in HD: Medea – The Metropolitan Opera

Originally written in French in 1797, The Met premiere the later Italian version of Cherubini’s rarely performed masterpiece, based on Euripides’ and Corneille’s tragedies, to open their new season in a co-production with the Greek National Opera, Canadian Opera Company, and Lyric Opera of Chicago. Spurning antiquity, director David McVicar sets the piece somewhere around the time of its original writing with a distinctly Gallic nod towards the French Revolution that would follow, and the straightforward simplicity of the set, which he also designed, is sympathetic to an audience mostly unfamiliar with the work. The breathless overture recedes to introduce Glauce (Janai Brugger), daughter of Creonte (Michele Pertusi), King of Corinth, and her impending marriage to Giasone (Matthew Po...