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.
Review: 'Rodelinda' at Met Is Masterpiece MIKE SILVERMAN Associated Press NEW YORK - George Frideric Handel's "Rodelinda" was a huge success at its London premiere in 1725, but it soon vanished from the stage and - like the composer's three...
Review: 'Rodelinda' at Met Is Masterpiece
MIKE SILVERMAN
Associated Press
NEW YORK - George Frideric Handel's "Rodelinda" was a huge success at its London premiere in 1725, but it soon vanished from the stage and - like the composer's three dozen other operas - languished unperformed for nearly 200 years.
Lovely music, went the prevailing assessment, but basically just a long string of arias with no dramatic coherence.
Yet today, "Rodelinda" is recognized as a masterpiece that can enthrall a modern audience if it's cast with first-rate singers and presented in a lively production. Both requirements are met handsomely in the production that premiered Thursday at the Metropolitan Opera, starring soprano Renee Fleming in the title role and directed by Stephen Wadsworth.
Adapting their plot from an obscure eighth-century history, Handel and his librettist streamlined the story to focus on Rodelinda, queen of Milan, and her husband, King Bertarido, who has been overthrown by the tyrant Grimoaldo. When the opera begins, Bertarido is believed dead, and Grimoaldo is plotting to marry Rodelinda, but it turns out the deposed monarch is alive and hoping to reunite with his wife and young son. A subplot involves the king's sister, Eduige, and a villainous court counselor, Garibaldo.
It's true that the opera consists almost entirely of solo arias (28 of them, plus one duet and a final ensemble). But Handel builds the dramatic tension so skillfully that the emotional stakes keep rising during each of the three acts until the happy resolution brings a genuine sense of rejoicing.
Fleming, one of today's operatic superstars, has tackled a diverse repertory at the Met, triumphing in Strauss, Mozart and Verdi, but having less success in Bellini's bel canto relic "Il Pirata." As Rodelinda, she sang with commitment and attention to detail, though her soft-grained voice took awhile to warm up. She hit her stride in Act 2 with a ravishing performance of the aria "Ritorna, o caro" as she awaited her reunion with Bertarido (countertenor David Daniels) then joined him in a meltingly beautiful account of the duet that closes the act before he is led off to prison.
Daniels sang with fire and admirable dexterity throughout the evening, though his middle register at times sounded underpowered. Another bravura countertenor, Bejun Mehta, sang the supporting role of Unulfo, Bertarido's ally in the court. Mezzo Stephanie Blythe was magnificent in her few opportunities to shine as Eduige; as Grimoaldo, South African tenor Kobe van Rensburg made a strong debut, with a voice of modest size but unforced flexibility. Bass John Relyea was compelling as Garibaldo and gets extra points for singing while mounting and riding off on a horse.
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