Rossini’s La donna del Lago at the Royal Opera House boasts a superstar cast. Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Flórez are perhaps the best in these roles in the business at this time. Yet the conductor Michele Mariotti is also hot news.
It would seem a logical step for the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey to take on the role of the Composer in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos.
“Aim for excellence”, says Douglas Boyd, new Artistic Director of Garsington Opera at Wormsley, “and the audience will follow you”.
When I spoke with Zandra Rhodes, she was in her large San Diego workspace, which she described as having walls decorated with her own huge black and white drawings.
Palm Beach audiences are famous for their glamour, but in recent years a special star has sparkled amid the jewels, sequins, feathers and furs (whatever the weather).
When the soprano Jessica Pratt first arrived in Italy, she had yet to learn the language or sing in a staged opera.
On Wednesday evening, February 20, Los Angeles Opera gave a press conference at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion featuring Music Director James Conlon.
It is another “What Could Have Been” moment. The debut of Brokeback Mountain by Charles Wuorinen is part of Madridʼs Teatro Real coming season.
Plans for July’s Aix-en-Provence Festival were announced and opera is, of course, at the center of the program with a particularly noteworthy Richard Strauss production.
Amsterdam enjoys a rare visit from Moscow’s Stanislavski Opera at the landmark Koninklijk Carre Theater, for three performances of Tchaikovski’s Eugene Onegin and a Sunday morning opera concert, on February 1st-3rd.
A new festival hall has been inaugurated in the small town of Erl in the Tyrolean mountains.
Yesterday, Conductor Riccardo Muti opened the Rome Opera, where he is “honorary conductor for life,” with a gala presentation of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra.
When tenor Michael Spyres takes the stage at Carnegie Hall on December 5th, he will be in heady company.
One of the most noteworthy and controversial productions in recent memory arrived in Belgium with hurricane force as Director Terry Gilliam’s inaugural opera, an inspired interpretation of Hector Berlioz’s Le Damnation de Faust, blasted into Ghent, followed by a run in Antwerp.
Florian Boesch is singing Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin at the Oxford Lieder Festival on Sunday 14th October. This won’t be routine. Radically challenging conventional interpretation, Boesch says “I don’t believe it ends in suicide”
Exciting developments at Glyndebourne ! Many new initiatives which could transform Glyndebourne from a summer festival to a truly international, year-round opera experience.
The recently released numbers for the past season at Barcelona’s opera Liceu gives some hope for the future.
A record 278,978 people attended events of the 2012 edition of the famed Salzburg Festival in Austria, the largest number since its founding 92 years ago.
Just after things were settling after the scandal of baritone Evgeny Nitikin supposed swastika tattoo at the Bayreuth Festival, another one seems likely to take its place.
Three quarters of the way through this discussion, a question that inhabits the mind of anyone putting any thought to the subject — but no one dare ask — was rhetoricised, “what is opera?”
Today at the University of Melbourne, an excerpt from Vivaldi's newly discovered choral setting of Psalm 110 ("Dixit Dominus") received its modern premiere, marking an historic occasion not only for musicologists but for the field in general.
By Carlo Vitali [Musical America]
Countertenor Christopher Field performed "De torrente in via bibet," an aria for alto and strings from the work's ninth movement, at the Faculty of Music's Melba Hall, with Linda Kent conducting the school's Baroque ensemble. Dr. Janice Stockigt, a musicologist at the University, recently identified the 11-movement piece for choir, soloists and orchestra, capping a five-year research project in Dresden's Saxon State Library. She says the score formerly had been attributed to Vivaldi's younger Venetian contemporary Baldassarre Galuppi.
Stockigt's finding that this "Dixit Dominus" was in fact Vivaldi's was subsequently confirmed by Michael Talbot, a leading expert on the composer and professor emeritus at the University of Liverpool. Though the work is but one of his three extant Psalm 100 settings, its importance in the study of his overall oeuvre is paramount. The spectactular choral fugue concluding the piece on the words "Sicut erat in principio," for example, overturns the traditionally accepted notion that Vivaldi didn't care much for strict counterpoint.
Indeed, Talbot has declared it the most significant Vivaldi discovery in 75 years. And Professor Warren Bebbington, Dean of the Melbourne Faculty of Music, forecasts that "Vivaldi lovers the world over will be excited to hear this brilliant work, all thanks to Jan Stockigt's intrepid research."
The project that yielded Stockigt's find, funded by the Australian Research Council, aims to identify and analyse the repertory of the Catholic court church of the Saxon capital, Dresden, during the 18th century. In her research she examined countless dozens of surviving manuscripts.
The setting is the fourth newly identified Vivaldi sacred work to have turned up in the Dresden Library in the last 20 years, thanks mostly to the joint efforts of Stockigt and Talbot. In each case, the piece belonged to a large consignment of sacred vocal works supplied to the Saxon court during the 1750s by Venetian copyist Giuseppe Baldan, a notorious falsifier of attributions out of commercial convenience. Vivaldi being dead and forgotten for the last decade, Baldan could reap additional profits from the composer's works by recycling them far from their original performance site (Venice) under the name of the more contemporary and thus fashionable Galuppi, whose name is proudly inscribed on the title-pages. The contrivance led astray not only Baldan's patrons, but also modern librarians and scholars.
Plans are afoot for the Koernerscher Sing-Verein Dresden to give the complete "Dixit Dominus" its modern premiere in Dresden, as part the city's forthcoming 800th anniversary celebrations.
Copyright 2005, Commonwealth Business Media, Inc.
This report is reprinted with the kind permission of Musical America, the "Business Source for the Performing Arts." Musical America is located on the Internet at http://www.musicalamerica.com/.