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?”
Last night’s French classical music awards show, the Victoires de la Musique Classique 2012, awarded the “Best Composer of the Year” honors to Philippe Manoury, 59, for his opera, “La Nuit de Gutenberg” (“The Night of Gutenberg”).
Manoury, also on the faculty at the University of California, San Diego, was influenced by Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen and is one of France’s most respected composers.
The opera’s world premiere, on September 24 at the Opera National du Rhin in Strasbourg, was well received by the audience and critics. It is a story of an old derelict who lives on the streets of modern day Strasbourg and calls himself Gutenberg. Could he be the same Johannes Gutenberg whose invention of movable type changed the world more than 500 years earlier in this very same town?
This writer was also there that evening and can report that the opera is based on late 20th Century composition techniques but always includes emotion, elegance and momentum. A young people’s chorus, with kids listening, talking or texting with their phones, was only one of the musical highlights. With flashbacks, it told the story of Gutenberg and his struggles in life. The opera was at once engaging as storytelling and powerful as music. Staged sparsely and effectively by Yoshi Oida and conducted by Daniel Klajner it was an evening of splendid vocal accomplishment. Bass Nicolas Cavallier sang the title role with Eve-Maud Hubeaux as his new friend and the fine coloratura of Mélanie Boisvert as the provocative “Hostess” of an internet cafe. Click here for a report (in French) on television channel Arte gives samples of the opera.
The Victoires de la Musique Classique, an awards show similar to the Classical Grammy Awards, features Renée Fleming as honored guest and spotlighted such singers as soprano Natalie Dessay, countertenor Philippe Jaroussky, soprano Nathalie Manfrino, contralto Nathalie Stutzmann, soprano Julia Lezhneva along with other classical artists. It is available for internet viewing this week here.
Frank Cadenhead