In which publication did Rupert Christiansen write his opera review of the year?
The 350th anniversary of Monteverdi's death, celebrated in 1993, brought a further wave of interest in his works, and since that time performances of L'incoronazione have been given in opera houses and music festivals all over the world. In April 1994 the Juilliard School in New York presented a version based on Curtis's edition, with an orchestra that mixed baroque and modern elements. Allan Kozinn wrote in The New York Times that this production had done well to resolve daunting problems arising from Monteverdi's having left instrumentation and scoring details open, and from the numerous competing versions of the score. In 2000 the work was chosen by Opéra de Montréal as the company's first venture into baroque opera, with a performance directed by Renaud Doucet. Opera Canada reported that Doucet had found "a perfect rhetoric for a modern crowd, creating an atmosphere of moral ambivalence that the courtiers of Monteverdi's day would have taken for granted." Less successful, in the critics' eyes, was the innovative English National Opera (ENO) production directed by Chen Shi-Zheng in October 2007. According to The London Evening Standard critic Fiona Maddocks the cast was strong, but they all seemed to be playing in the wrong roles. For unexplained reasons much of the action took place underwater; at one point "a snorkeller flip-flops across the stage in a harness." Seneca "wore green Wellington boots and pushed a lawnmower". At the end of 2007, in his opera review of the year in The Daily Telegraph, Rupert Christiansen compared ENO's production unfavourably with a punk musical version of the opera that had been staged during that year's Edinburgh Festival.In May 2008 L'incoronazione returned to Glyndebourne in a new production by Robert Carsen, with Leppard's large-scale orchestration replaced by the period instruments of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Emmanuelle Haïm. The Organ's reviewer praised the vocal quality of the performers, found Haim's handling of the orchestra "a joy throughout" and declared the whole production "a blessed relief" after the previous year's ENO staging. On 19 August the Glyndebourne singers and the orchestra, led by Haim, presented a semi-staged version of the opera at the 2008 BBC Proms, at the Royal Albert Hall. Elsewhere the French-based ensemble Les Arts Florissants, under its director William Christie, presented the Monteverdi trilogy of operas (L'Orfeo, Il ritorno d'Ulisse and L'incoronazione) in the period 2008–10, with a series of performances at the Teatro Real in Madrid.
The Daily Telegraph