Opera on demand: why don't you become an opera critic?!

In lieu of live music the Edinburgh Music Review are reviewing a number of the online operas being streamed by the world's opera houses. Of course it's not as good as live opera, nothing can quite compare with the excitement of a live opera, but in the absence of live opera (and let's face it we may not get any more until September) it's the next best thing. Also one of the good side effects of the crisis is that many of the opera houses are offering live streaming free, whereas there used to be a hefty charge. For example the Met transmissions in the Edinburgh Cameo were £27 on a Saturday night! Personally I always preferred the Tuesday encore performances, at half the price and at midday when us older opera goers were more likely to stay awake! Now we have a cornucopia of performances streamed directly into our home, and if like me you have a Smart TV linked to your HiFi you can get great pictures and great sound. I’ve just bought an LG 43 inch TV for a reasonable £329 at John Lewis, guaranteed for 5 years, and a very clever neighbour has linked it to my vintage B&O 9000 amplifier with B&O Redline speakers. Together they produce fabulous sound and pictures, In addition the film direction of these performances is much better than the early days, although I'm still not sure I want close ups of singers’ throats!

Edinburgh Music Review launched in February and is already gaining increasing notice in Scotland, where we have been warmly welcomed by all the leading orchestras and opera houses. We are also recruiting a very fine team of critics, including Edinburgh based internationally renowned bass Brian Bannatyne-Scott, who is delighting in becoming a very good opera critic and indeed is regaling us with entertaining tales from his operatic life in our blog section. Kate Calder has shown herself to be a very fine reviewer of opera, and our Highland correspondent Mary-Ann Connolly is not only a dancer in past life but a theatre and musical director and producer and is chair of a major music festival in the Highlands and also a very good critic. However in this period of scarcity of live music we want to encourage you, our readers, to become critics and give us your reviews of live streamed performances. They can be as short or as long as you like, we will edit them for publication and you too can become an opera critic! Send them to our email edinburghmusicreview@gmail.com and we will acknowledge them and publish them, and so this crisis can become an opportunity for you to become an opera critic. You don't need to be a music professional. I'm not; I've just been going to operas for over 50 years and I know good from bad and great performances when I hear them!

Finally, here are a few suggestions for reviews. I am currently watching a very decent Tosca from Vienna with Sondra Radvanovsky as Tosca (a little matronly these days but still a fine voice), Piotr Beczala as Cavaradossi (not Pavarotti but a very sweet Italianate voice, although one Vienna audience member is persistently booing him!), and the veteran Thomas Hampson (a rather lightweight Scarpia but still with a sweet voice). If I were reviewing it I would give it 4 stars, but why don't you review it in more detail and decide for yourself? The choice of live streaming is enormous - the Met is streaming a new opera nightly but only keeping them up for 24 hours, Vienna is also streaming a new opera every night but they can be accessed for longer. Many other houses round the world are streaming. Tell us your favourites and give us your judgement, let this crisis be an opportunity to view all those operas you have never seen and become your own critic. Finally if you have put off becoming a Wagnerian up to now, why not give yourself a treat by watching the Met Ring Cycle with its mighty machine, or try my greatest Wagnerian experience, the Copenhagen Ring, directed by Kasper Holten. It’s a feminist production - all the women are strong, all the men are dodgy characters, but it's brilliantly produced and sung and shows off Copenhagen's splendid new opera house. It is freely available on YouTube. I was there, sitting next to Michael Portillo who was reviewing it for the New Statesman! I had to explain feminism to him, but it was more vividly brought home to him, as the new woman arts editor of the New Statesman sacked him as their opera critic! He said in his review “truly women are taking over the world!”.