Dulce Rosa, a brand new opera, had its world premiere Friday night, May 17, 2013 at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, California. It was produced by Los Angeles Opera, but staged in the smaller theater.
Richard Jones’ 2009 production of Verdi’s Falstaff translates the action from the first Elizabethan age to the start of the second.
Baritone Gareth John is rapidly accumulating a war-chest of honours. Winner of the 2013 Kathleen Ferrier Award, he recently won the Royal Academy of Music Patrons’ Award and was presented the Silver Medal by the Worshipful Company of Musicians.
This second revival of Jonathan Miller’s La bohème was the first time I had caught the production.
It’s Verdi’s bicentenary year and Rolando Villazón has two new CDs to plug — titled somewhat confusingly, ‘Villazón: Verdi’ and ‘Villazón’s Verdi’, the latter a ‘personal selection’ of favourite numbers performed by stars of the past and present.
Nicola Luisotti and the San Francisco Opera Orchestra climbed out of the War Memorial pit, braved the wind whipped bay and held spellbound an audience at Cal Performances’ Zellerbach Auditorium at UC Berkeley.
Utterly mad but absolutely right — Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos started the Glyndebourne 2013 season with an explosion. Strauss could hardly have made his intentions more clear. Ariadne auf Naxos is not “about” Greek myth so much as a satire on art and the way art is made.
“Man is an abyss. It makes one dizzy to look into it.” So utters Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, repeating what was also a recurring motif in the playwright’s own letters.
National Opera Company of the Rhine has marked this year’s Benjamin Britten celebration with a remarkably compelling, often gripping new production of the seldom-seen Owen Wingrave.
Once upon a time, Frankfurt Opera had the baddest ass reputation in Germany as “the” cutting edge producer of must-see opera.
Productions of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto can serve as a vehicle for individual singers to make a strong impression and become afterward associated with specific roles in the opera.
Just in case we were not aware that the evening’s programme was ‘themed’, the Britten Sinfonia designed a visual accompaniment to their musical exploration of night, sleep and dreams.
Poor Aida! She never seems to have anything go her way.
Is it possible to upstage Jonas Kaufmann? Kaufmann was brilliant in this Verdi Don Carlo at the Royal Opera House, London, but the rest of the cast was so good that he was but first among equals. Don Carlo is a vehicle for stars, but this time the stars were everyone on stage and in the pit. Even the solo arias, glorious as they are, grow organically out of perfect ensemble. This was a performance that brought out the true beauty of Verdi's music.
The big names were absent: Duparc, D’Indy, Debussy, Ravel … and while Fauré, Chausson, Roussel and several members of Les Six put in an appearance, in less than familiar guises, this survey of French song of the early 20th century and interwar years deliberately took us on a journey through infrequently travelled terrain.
Composed between 1718 and 1720, Handel’s Esther is sometimes described as the ‘first English Oratorio’, but is in fact a hybrid form, mixing elements of oratorio, masque, pastoral and opera.
Hector Berlioz's légende dramatique, La Damnation de Faust, exists somewhere between cantata and opera. Berlioz's flexible attitude to dramatic form made the piece unworkable on the stages of early 19th century Paris and his music is so vivid that you wonder whether the piece needs staging at all.
St. John’s Smith Square was the site of Elizabeth Connell’s final London concert, intended as a farewell to London on her moving to Australia. It was rendered ultimately final by her unexpected death.
With the building of the Suez Canal, Egypt became more interesting to Western Europeans. Khedive Ismail Pasha wanted a hymn by Verdi for the opening of a new opera house in Cairo, but the composer said he did not write occasional pieces.
Back for its fourth revival, David McVicar’s 2003 production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte has much charm, beauty and artistry.
We previously reported on the Manhattan School of Music production of Lee Hoiby's A Month in the Country. Here is Anne Midgette's review. A Russian Play, Reimagined by an American Composer By ANNE MIDGETTE "We've lost a few people," said...
We previously reported on the Manhattan School of Music production of Lee Hoiby's A Month in the Country. Here is Anne Midgette's review.
A Russian Play, Reimagined by an American Composer
By ANNE MIDGETTE
"We've lost a few people," said a woman in the audience, surveying a few empty seats after the intermission of Lee Hoiby's opera "A Month in the Country," which opened at the Manhattan School of Music on Wednesday night. "And I don't know why. It's so beautiful."
We have lost a few people. Or rather, we've lost a few operas. Mr. Hoiby was once a rising star over the American opera landscape. But you don't see his work anymore at, say, the New York City Opera, where "A Month in the Country" (originally titled "Natalia Petrovna," and based on the play by Turgenev) had its premiere in 1964. And that's a shame, because "A Month in the Country" is a wonderful opera.
You could perhaps carp that Mr. Hoiby's music is conservative, tonal and breaks little new ground, but I was too busy being engrossed by it, and by the opera's psychological insight and grateful vocal writing, both equally rare. It didn't hurt that the Manhattan School of Music cast it strikingly well and gave it a fine production by Ned Canty (down to Elizabeth Hope Clancy's period costumes).
Every part here had something to offer. The lead role of Natalia, a beautiful, bored aristocrat who falls in love with her niece's tutor, is huge and demanding; JennyRebecca Winans showed a lovely, smooth voice that matched her poise, and if she lost some steam in places, it's hard to think of a singer who wouldn't. As the tutor, Liam Bonner had a big, impressive baritone that was slightly raw and unpolished (perfectly fitting the character); as the niece, Vera, Yoosun Park was a bit challenged by the upper register.
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