Quite a hefty price for a paperback, even if it does have a few black and white illustrations, but Tom Sutcliffe's masterly survey of contemporary opera is well on its way to being a reference Bible for opera-lovers. So if you want to know who are the key players in making today's opera productions look as they do, and the reasoning behind their approach, you'd better invest. It's all in here, from Peter Brook's pioneering work in the Covent Garden of the late 1940s, at a time when "opera" and "theatre" could be considered by critics as mutually exclusive, to Patrice Chereau's controversial 1970s stagings of Wagner at Bayreuth, greeted at the time by screams of abuse but now seen as a turningpoint in how we think about music theatre. Sutcliffe is provocative and opinionated and writes like a dream; the amount of information crammed into these 464 pages is staggering.
Arminta Wallace