As Peter Jonas, former managing director of English National Opera, observed in his recent passionate defence of the company and its current artistic director John Berry, honourable failures and the “occasional stinker” are par for the course alongside “thrilling successes” when offering a programme of the range and ambition that ENO regularly tackles. Making a selection of the hits and the misses from the 10 years during which Berry has been calling the shots at the Coliseum isn’t straightforward; but there were certainly many more of the former than the latter that could have been included.
Six of the best
Satyagraha (2007): Berry’s first great success, and the Improbable theatre company’s first foray into opera, with the London stage premiere of Philip Glass’s second and arguably still his greatest dramatic work. Read our review
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2011): Outstanding productions of Britten have been a feature of the recent ENO repertory, and Christopher Alden’s Dream, transplanted to a boys’ boarding school in the 1950s, has been the most startling and unsettling of all of them. Read our review
Caligula (2012): Too little contemporary opera from elsewhere in Europe gets to be seen in London; Benedict Andrews’s superb version of Detlev Glanert’s 2006 score was a memorable exception. Read our review
Peter Grimes (2009): Built around a titanic performance of the title role by Stuart Skelton, David Alden’s expressionist staging was the finest, most searching version of Britten’s masterpiece seen in London in the last 30 years. Read our review
Rodelinda (2014): ENO has been at the forefront of the revival of interest in staging Handel since the 1970s, and Richard Jones’s fabulously deft and witty production is the most recent in the distinguished line of great Coliseum shows. Read our review
Benvenuto Cellini (2014): Terry Gilliam’s successful move into opera direction was thanks to John Berry and ENO. His two Berlioz productions have been crammed with vivid imagery and showed a penetrating understanding of what makes Berlioz’s operas such a special challenge. Read Terry Gilliam’s opera diary
The misses
Die Fledermaus (2013): It’s quite an achievement to make Johann Strauss’s operetta both unsexy and unfunny, but Christopher Alden, of all directors, managed to do just that.
Gaddafi (2006): A wholly unsuccessful attempt, involving the Asian Dub Foundation, to create a crossover piece that could conceivably have brought that mythical “new audience” flocking to the Coliseum; it didn’t, nor was it ever likely to.
Lucrezia Borgia (2011): Film directors don’t always transfer their skills seamlessly to opera, and Mike Figgis’s take on rare Donizetti showed just how treacherous such a switch can be.
The Coronation of Poppea (2007): The worst kind of postmodern kitsch from Chen Shi-Zheng, turning one of the supreme masterpieces in the whole of operatic history into a silly fashion parade.
Carmen (2007): Sally Potter joined the list of film directors who showed that staging opera is harder than it seems with this bloodless show, making one of the most visceral of all 19th-century works utterly uninvolving.
Idomeneo (2010): No list of operatic duds would be complete without a Katie Mitchell show, and typically her take on Mozart’s great opera seria imposed her own spurious dramaturgy where it just wasn’t needed.
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