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.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro has a libretto by Lorenzo daPonte based on the French play La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro (The Crazy Day or the Marriage of Figaro) by Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799).
For its world class Easter Festival, Baden-Baden mounted a Die Zauberflöte that owed more to the grey penitential doldrums of Lent than to the unbridled jubilance of re-birth.
Once Berkeley Opera, renamed West Edge Opera, this enterprising company offers the Bay Area’s only serious alternative to corporate opera, to wit Bonjour M. Gauguin.
In the first of pianist Julius Drake’s three-part series, ‘Perspectives’, our gaze was directed at Gustav Mahler’s eclectic musical responses to human experiences: from the trauma and distress of anguished love to the sweet contentment of true friendship, from the agonised introspection of the artist to the diverse dramas of human interaction.
The Los Angeles opera company marketed its spring production of Rossini's La Cenerentola as Cinderella though there is no opera by that name. The libretto of La Cenerentola is not the Cinderella story we know.
Any production of Wagner’s Ring cycle needs some kind of coherence, so it is logical for a staging of Die Walküre to continue where the previous instalment, Das Rheingold, left off. In the case of the Royal Opera’s new production, though, that turns out to be not such a good thing at all.
Die Walküre
Royal Opera House, London
Andrew Clements [The Guardian, 7 Mar 05]
Any production of Wagner's Ring cycle needs some kind of coherence, so it is logical for a staging of Die Walküre to continue where the previous instalment, Das Rheingold, left off. In the case of the Royal Opera's new production, though, that turns out to be not such a good thing at all.
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Bryn Terfel's First Wotan as Horns and Hounds Bay
By PAUL GRIFFITHS [NY Times, 7 Mar 05]
LONDON, March 6 - The new Covent Garden production of Wagner's "Ring" revolved Saturday night into its second quadrant, with a performance of "Die Walküre" every bit as exciting as the "Rheingold" in December. Once again, the excitement was thoroughly and fundamentally musical, its dual sources in the singing and in the pit, where the company's music director, Antonio Pappano, made the score consistently intense and animated.
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Wo sich Wotan die Finger verbrennt
VON PETRA HAIDERER [Die Presse, 08 Mar 05]
Covent Garden präsentiert eine neue "Walküre" - Vorhang auf zum Sammelsurium lächerlicher Einfälle!
Der "erste Tag" von Wagners Büh nenfestspiel knüpft optisch direkt am "Vorabend" - Rheingold (Pre miere Dezember 2004) - an. Hunding hat offenbar den Göttern die Möbel abgekauft (Bühnenbild: Stefanos Lazaridis). Er ist bekanntlich ein rauer Bursche, die Ledersessel sind aufgeschlitzt, die raumhohe Terrassentür ist zerbrochen. Schmächtig statt "mächtig" haben die Wurzeln der Esche Platz. Den schönen Marmortisch der Götter hat der Haudegen unversehrt gelassen. Ein Glück, denn über den kullert Siegmund abgehetzt ins Zimmer. Sieglindes Gemach hängt schräg im Raum, einige Stufen führen hinauf. An der Decke surrt leise ein grosser silberner Ventilator.
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Royal season centrepiece leaves much to be desired
By Andrew Clark [Financial Times, 7 Mar 05]
After a decade of famine, London is feasting on Richard Wagner's four-part epic Der Ring des Nibelungen.
The longest and most ambitious work ever completed for the opera stage is packing in the crowds not just at the Royal Opera House, where Die Walküre opened on Saturday, but at the Coliseum, where The Twilight of the Gods will next month complete English National Opera's long-gestated Ring.
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Amid the nonsense, a towering Terfel fulfils his destiny
[Daily Telegraph, 8 Mar 05]
Rupert Christiansen reviews Die Walküre at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden
No opera begins with more tense expectancy than Die Walküre, as Wagner's orchestra depicts the fugitive Siegmund running desperately through a storm.
Illustrating this breathtakingly dramatic music with strobe lighting is the first of many shallow theatrical clichés that mar Keith Warner's new staging - an infuriating mixture of the corny and chic, littered with gimmicky special effects (some of which went horribly wrong) to the detriment of grandeur and credibility.