Recently in Performances
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.
Performances
06 May 2005
Magic Flute in Brussels
Durant les riches années passées à la tête de la Monnaie de Bruxelles, Bernard Foccroulle aura élargi la palette de la mise en scène d’opéra, en faisant appel à des chorégraphes ou à des plasticiens. Ainsi, l’homme de théâtre et dessinateur, le Sud-Africain William Kentridge, grand inventeur d’images fixes et animées. Si l’alchimie se fait entre l’univers visuel du créateur et l’oeuvre qu’il met en scène, cela peut renouveler la question. Dans le cas contraire, on a l’impression de voir, pour paraphraser Godard, non pas «des images justes», mais «juste des images». C’est ce qui se passe avec La Flûte enchantée vue par Kentridge.
Scene from Die Zauberflöte (Photo: Johan Jacobs)
Mozart sans magie
Christian Merlin [Le Figaro, 2 May 05]
Durant les riches années passées à la tete de la Monnaie de Bruxelles, Bernard Foccroulle aura élargi la palette de la mise en scène d'opéra, en faisant appel à des chorégraphes ou à des plasticiens. Ainsi, l'homme de théâtre et dessinateur, le Sud-Africain William Kentridge, grand inventeur d'images fixes et animées. Si l'alchimie se fait entre l'univers visuel du créateur et l'oeuvre qu'il met en scène, cela peut renouveler la question. Dans le cas contraire, on a l'impression de voir, pour paraphraser Godard, non pas "des images justes", mais "juste des images". C'est ce qui se passe avec La Flute enchantée vue par Kentridge.
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"La Flute..." version désenchantée, par William Kentridge
Bruxelles de notre envoyée spéciale [Le Monde, 6 May 05]
En confiant La Flute enchantée de Mozart à l'artiste sud-africain William Kentridge, le directeur de La Monnaie, Bernard Foccroulle, avait peut-etre d'autres intentions que l'inévitable logique de renouvellement de la mise en scène d'opéra qu'il met en oeuvre depuis moult années.
Kentridge est homme de théâtre et d'opéra, plasticien, dessinateur, cinéaste, réalisateur de courts-métrages d'animation. Depuis 1992, il est l'un des piliers du KunstFestivaldesArts de Bruxelles, ou il a réalisé des spectacles avec le Handspring Puppet Company (Woyzeck on the Highfield, Faustus in Africa) et, en 1998, une première incursion dans le domaine de l'opéra, avec une adaptation d'Il ritorno d'Ulisse de Monteverdi pour La Monnaie. Cela étant posé, on ne résoudra pas pour autant l'énigme de savoir pourquoi Kentridge et pas un autre.
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