Recently in Reviews
24 Apr 2010
The Shadowboxer project, an opera about the life of heavyweight
boxing champion Joe Louis, began as an idea in director Leon Major’s mind
twenty years ago. »
24 Apr 2010
The University of Maryland Opera Studio premiered a new commission this
week: Shadowboxer, composed by Frank Proto, and based on the life of
boxing champion Joe Louis. »
24 Apr 2010
An opera about boxer Joe Louis might seem like a futile undertaking:
according to 1930s New York Times reporter Meyer Berger, “Joe
Louis avoids meeting people, hates conversation (even fight talk) and says less
than any man in sports…” »
23 Apr 2010
The abiding elegance and beauty of Christopher Maltman’s baritone,
complemented by the interpretative wisdom and experience of Graham Johnson, one
of the finest vocal accompanists of recent times, made this an evening of
assured musicianship and expressive poise. »
20 Apr 2010
Previously released on DVD, the Netherlands Opera recording of
Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk »
20 Apr 2010
This disc neatly captures a central dichotomy of the career of composer Aaron Copland. »
19 Apr 2010
‘Come sweet death … for I am weary of the world’: thus,
the opening lines of Bach’s aria, ‘Komm Süßer Tod’, from the
Schemelli Liederbuch, led us into the realms of the afterlife, and
encapsulated the central sentiment of this evening of songs meditating on, and
calling for, release from toilsome human cares. »
19 Apr 2010
Opera festival DVDs often seem to be produced as tempting advertisements meant to induce viewers to consider a trip to that festival for the next season. »
19 Apr 2010
‘Each action will derive new grace
From order, measure, time and place;’ (Milton, Il
Penseroso) »
17 Apr 2010
Had John Carpenter come up with the “beheading” of John the Baptist, it might have not been too much different from the effect we endured in the new Salome produced by the Heidelberg City Theatre. »
11 Apr 2010
Thoughtfully devised by Iain Burnside, this recital juxtaposed ballad with
art song, pastoral with love lyric, dark with light, mournful with carefree. An
imaginative sequence of songs, woven together according to linking themes,
confirmed that Ireland truly is a ‘land of song’. »
11 Apr 2010
One of the City Opera’s happiest ventures over the years has been their Handel series. »
11 Apr 2010
An anti-facist, anti-war opera written in Germany while the Nazis were in power? K A Hartmann’s Des Simplicius Simplicissimus Jugend was a brave act of conscience, even though the opera wasn't publicly performed until 1948. »
06 Apr 2010
The boo’s were boisterous when director/designer Achim Freyer came on stage at the end of Götterdämmerung in Los Angeles’ Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on April 3. »
05 Apr 2010
It may be possible that there is no more effervescent entertainment on stage
in London now than the tirelessly clever revival of Il Turco in
Italia now playing at the Royal Opera House. »
03 Apr 2010
Design is rotten in Denmark, evidently — and in every other grand
opera locale. “Palace” has come to mean “high school
basement,” or that’s what they look like. “Royal” is
synonymous with sleazy men in suits. »
03 Apr 2010
Much of the fascination of the new DVD of Verdi’s Falstaff (Glyndebourne 2009) lies in the Richard Jones’s updating: the action takes place in 1946. »
01 Apr 2010
There are two reasons why you need to see the new Otello DVD (Salzburg Festival 2008).
»
29 Mar 2010
Once again, as in L’Etoile, Mark Lamos’s staging and
Robert Wierzel’s lighting nearly steal the show in the City Opera’s
revival of Madama Butterfly. »
28 Mar 2010
Many congratulations and thanks are in order to the Collegiate Chorale for
bringing Ricky Ian Gordon’s adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath to New York audiences this week. »
28 Mar 2010
Unlike instrumental players, singers “are” their instrument. They aren't machines. Performance is affected by many shifting factors, which need to be understood. »
28 Mar 2010
Angels in America, Peter Eötvös’s opera based on the Tony Kushner plays, received its London premiere. This was very high profile. David Robertson conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a performance that will be broadcast internationally, online on www.bbc.co.uk/radio3. »
27 Mar 2010
Premiered on 15 April 2008, The Minotaur is Harrison Birtwistle’s latest opera, and it stands well with the composer’s other stage work. »
26 Mar 2010
Mark Lamos’ production of Chabrier’s L’Etoile is
perfectly ridiculous. »
25 Mar 2010
At one point in her career, Eva Marton appeared poised to be the true inheritor of Birgit Nilsson’s legacy roles: Wagner and Strauss’s most dramatic heroines, as well as key Italian roles (Puccini in particular). »
23 Mar 2010
Genoveva and Lohengrin both premiered in the summer of 1850. Wagner disparaged Schumann, as he disparaged Mendelssohn (Schumann’s hero). Wagner’s opinions were influential. Genoveva has been eclipsed, saddled with a reputation for being hard to stage. »
22 Mar 2010
Yes, the complete Ring des Nibelungen currently on stage at Dresden’s Semper Opera qualifies as Regieoper, but it’s Regieoper with a twist. »
22 Mar 2010
It was a bit of intrigue that recalled the Wagners at home back in Bayreuth’s Haus Wahnfried. »
21 Mar 2010
An enchanting evening at Covent Garden: »
17 Mar 2010
It takes some courage these days for an opera company to program a Gian Carlo Menotti opera. Nonetheless last month the Opéra de Marseille defied current sensibilities to give us a new production of The Saint of Bleecker Street. »
17 Mar 2010
Les Troyens is the noblest grand opera ever composed by a Frenchman, one of those desert-island works of which it is impossible to tire because its depths can never be completely sounded. »
17 Mar 2010
Advertised as ‘ A night of powerful music with today’s superstars,’ Arizona Opera’s concert of opera arias definitely lived up to those words. »
17 Mar 2010
Anguished, lacerating, irredeemably tragic, David Alden’s new production of Katya Kabanova presents a drama of unalleviated suffering and unremitting bleakness. »
17 Mar 2010
Five years after the première of Pelléas et Mélisande, Wilhelm
Worringer published the twentieth century’s first great treatise on
abstraction in art: »
17 Mar 2010
For many, the fine recordings of Richard Strauss’s tone poem Don Juan by the late Karl Böhm seem to have emerged full-spring from the baton of Karl Böhm and the playing of the various orchestras he led. »
17 Mar 2010
Philip Glass's Satyagraha at the English National Opera, at the Coliseum, London, proves that modern minimalism can be extraordinarily moving. The secret is to open your soul, as Gandhi did, when he searched the Baghavad-Gita for inspiration.
»
15 Mar 2010
A silvery tree stretched its gnarled branches across the moonlit stage, and from the briar and bush spiky, feathered fairies wriggled and crept, intent on mischief and malevolence. »
12 Mar 2010
When the orchestra re-tuned itself between the intermissionless acts of the Met premiere of The Nose last week, many in the audience were uncertain whether they were hearing practice or prelude. »
11 Mar 2010
The curtain rises on an enormous pile of crumbling reinforced concrete,
broken wires sticking out every which way – an image that has replaced
(at least in the minds of set designers) the romantic columned or castellated
ruins that thrilled our ancestors, especially around the time, 1846, that Verdi
composed Attila. »
09 Mar 2010
As a medic with a keen knowledge of psychology, Jonathan Miller probably knows a thing or two about elixirs and placebos. »
09 Mar 2010
The global credit crunch, with its painful exposure of the moral and literal
bankruptcy of our own age, provides the perfect backdrop for this new
production of Prokofiev’s The Gambler, the first ever staging of
this opera at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. »
08 Mar 2010
In its current revival of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore Lyric Opera of Chicago’s production showcases the strengths and foibles of humanity, while assuring the ultimate triumph of love. »
08 Mar 2010
Throughout his relatively long and decidedly successful career, Giacomo Puccini returned to those operas of his that had not, immediately or eventually, secured an important place in the standard repertory. »
08 Mar 2010
This second of two recitals of Schubert songs by Matthias Goerne and Helmut Deutsch at the Wigmore Hall, London was superb, the programme created with exceptional intelligence and insight into the inner dynamics of Schubert’s music. »
08 Mar 2010
Handel’s Tamerlano, in the production by Graham Vick, is well
known, but its run at the Royal Opera House is unusual because many of the cast
are creating the roles for the first time. It isn't a live reprise of the DVD,
but more challenging. »
05 Mar 2010
The Baden State Theatre's new mounting of I Masnadieri may not completely be the production of one’s dreams. »
05 Mar 2010
In this, the first of two recitals with pianist Helmut Deutsch, baritone Matthias Goerne continued his very personal journey through the landscape of Schubert’s lieder, a passage which is currently being preserved on an outstanding series of discs by Harmonia Mundi. »
05 Mar 2010
As the first familiar themes of Ariadne came from the pit, I felt
myself sinking — sinking from a tense, dreary, daily world into a sort of
ecstatic fantasy — a place where all was happy, funny, romantic, inane,
fateful and surprising all at once — Sarah Connolly superb, Kathleen Kim
charming, Nina Stemme full-throated, »
04 Mar 2010
Zürich Opera’s poster for their new production of Idomeneo is a knockout. »
13 Feb 2010
Concert opera has a long and glorious tradition in Montpellier. Each year the Orchestra National de Montpellier regales us with one or two during the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier (July). »
![Maria Antunez as Rosa and Alfredo Daza as Tadeo [Photo by Robert Millard courtesy of Los Angeles Opera]](http://www.operatoday.com/SwR1225.gif)