27 Feb 2007

The Maid of Orleans, Carnegie Hall, New York

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/efd843de-c4e6-11db-b110-000b5df10621.html

Joan_of_arc.pngBy Martin Bernheimer [Financial Times, 27 February 2007]

Tchaikovsky’s Orleanskaya deva is better known hereabouts, if known at all, as The Maid of Orleans. First staged in St Petersburg in 1881, it represents a bizarre yet wondrous mishmash – part grand opera in the old Parisian tradition, part blood-and-guts melodrama predicated on Russian romance, part showpiece for a superhuman mezzo-soprano.