The Importance of Being Earnest , Gerald Barry’s fifth opera, was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and the Barbican, and was first performed in concert, Thomas Adès conducting the London premiere.
‘Beauty is the one form of spirituality that we experience through the senses.’ In Thomas Mann’s, Death in Venice, Plato’s axiom stirs the hopes of the aging, intellectually stale poet, Gustav von Aschenbach, that he may rekindle his creativity.
There is a sense in which it all began in London, Puccini having been seized in 1900 with the idea of an opera on this subject after watching David Belasco’s play here.
The tenor that the audience most wanted to hear, Plácido Domingo, opened the vocal program with “Junto al puente de la peña” (Next to the rock bridge) from La Canción del Olvido (The song of Oblivion) by José Serrano. He sounded rested and his voice soared majestically over the orchestra.
Tucked away somewhere in the San Francisco Opera warehouse was an old John Cox production of Così fan tutte from Monte Carlo. Well, not that old by current standards at San Francisco Opera.
Rossini's Maometto Secondo is a major coup for Garsington Opera at Wormsley, confirming its status as the leading specialist Rossini house in Britain. Maometto Secondo is a masterpiece, yet rarely performed because it's formidably difficult to sing. It's a saga with some of the most intense music Rossini ever wrote, expressing a drama so powerful that one can understand why early audiences needed "happy endings" to water down its impact
I suppose it was inevitable that, in this Britten Centenary year, the 66th Aldeburgh Festival would open with Peter Grimes.
Die Entführung aus dem Serail at Garsington Opera at Wormsley isn’t Mozart as you’d expect but it’s true to the spirit of Mozart who loved witty, madcap japes.
What a pity! On a glorious — well, by recent English standards — summer’s day, there can be few more beautiful English countryside settings than Glyndebourne, with the added bonus, as alas much of the audience appears to understand it, of an opera house attached.
Described by one critic as “cosmically gifted”, during her tragically short career, American mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson amazed and delighted audiences with the spellbinding beauty of her singing and the astonishing honesty of her performances.
“I wrote it almost without noticing.” So Verdi declared when reminded of his eighth — and perhaps least frequently performed, opera, Alzira. One might say that, since he composed the work, no-one else has much noticed either.
Just when you thought the protagonist was Hoffmann! Who, rather what stole the show?
When is verismo verily veristic? Or what is a virginal girl dressed in communion white doing in the two murderous acts of the Los Angeles Opera’s current production of Tosca? And why does she sing the shepherd's song?
Wagner’s Lohengrin is not an unfamiliar visitor to the UK thanks, in the main, to Elijah Moshinsky’s perennial production at Covent Garden.
Philip Glass's The Perfect American at the ENO in London is a visual treat, but the libretto is mind-numbingly anodyne.
Jonathan Dove's Mansfield Park, with libretto by his regular collaborator Alasdair Middleton, has the remarkable distinction of being the first completed operatic adaptation of any Jane Austen novel to be staged.
London’s two principal opera companies have offered a baffling near-silence as their response to Wagner’s two-hundredth anniversary.
If a recent trio of musically superlative performances at Canadian Opera Company is indicative of their norm, the casting director should get a hefty bonus.
Just when you imagine you’ve got the operatic time-line fixed in your mind in a clean sweep of what goes where and when and how, you hear another work from another forgotten corner of the repertory that upends one’s conclusions.
Nothing inspires fable quite like defeat. The great riddle of Spanish history is how the Christian Visigoths managed to lose the Iberian peninsula to the Moors in one small battle in 711 and took eight hundred years to get it back.
Kritik Staatsoper: Sie war doch nur scheintot VON WILHELM SINKOVICZ Wie Erich Wolfgang Korngolds einstiger Sensationserfolg "Die tote Stadt" zum Repertoirestück wird. Wiederbelebungsversuche startet man seit geraumer Zeit mit vie len Werken, die unter der ära des Nationalsozialismus als "entartet"...
Kritik Staatsoper: Sie war doch nur scheintot
VON WILHELM SINKOVICZ
Wie Erich Wolfgang Korngolds einstiger Sensationserfolg "Die tote Stadt" zum Repertoirestück wird.
Wiederbelebungsversuche startet man seit geraumer Zeit mit vie len Werken, die unter der ära des Nationalsozialismus als "entartet" verboten waren und dann nach 1945 den Weg zurück in die Opernhäuser und Konzertsäle nicht mehr schaffen wollten. Erich Wolfgang Korngold war einer jener Komponisten, die besonders darunter zu leiden hatten. Anders als etwa Franz Schreker, der 1934 gestorben war, musste er nach dem Krieg miterleben, wie das Publikum, das einst seinen Kompositionen zugejubelt hatte, plötzlich verständnislos reagierte; schlimmer noch: gleichgültig.
Weil es ihm gelungen war, im amerikanischen Exil in der Filmbranche zu reüssieren und den typischen Hollywood-Sound regelrecht zu erfinden - indem er schlicht seine wienerische Fin-de-siècle-Kunst in die USA transferierte , urteilten die strengen Richter der Moderne im Alten Europa den Heimkehrer als ewiggestrigen Romantiker ab, der nicht einsah, dass nach Schönberg und seiner Schule keine C-Dur, nicht einmal Fis-Dur-Dreiklänge mehr erlaubt sein sollten. Es bedurfte des Befreiungsschlags der so genannten Postmoderne, um den Blick freizumachen auf die Tatsache, dass die Moderne, grob gesprochen, nicht nur aus der Zwölftönerei bestand, sondern ein reicher Humus war, aus dem unterschiedlichste Klangwelten erblühen konnten.
Die schillerndste, weil besonders leuchtkräftig orchestrierte, war sicher jene von Korngold. Die "Tote Stadt" darf überdies als einer der wenigen gelungenen Versuche gelten, die Errungenschaften der eben erfundenen Psychoanalyse aufs künstlerische Parkett zu transferieren.
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Recommended recording:
Korngold: Die Tote Stadt / Leinsdorf, Neblett, Kollo, Et Al