Recently in Reviews
18 Jun 2013
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. »
17 Jun 2013
‘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. »
16 Jun 2013
What better way for Masonic brothers, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Emmanuel Shikaneder to disseminate Masonic virtues, than through the most popular musical entertainment of their age, a happy ending folktale that features a dragon, enchanting flutes and bells, mixed-up parentage, and a beautiful young princess in distress? »
14 Jun 2013
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. »
13 Jun 2013
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. »
12 Jun 2013
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. »
12 Jun 2013
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 »
11 Jun 2013
I suppose it was inevitable that, in this Britten Centenary year, the 66th Aldeburgh Festival would open with Peter Grimes. »
10 Jun 2013
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. »
09 Jun 2013
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. »
09 Jun 2013
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. »
09 Jun 2013
Since its first performance at the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo during Venice’s 1643 Carnevale, Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea has been one of the most important milestones in the genesis of modern opera despite its 250 years of unmerited obscurity. »
09 Jun 2013
“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. »
09 Jun 2013
Just when you thought the protagonist was Hoffmann! Who, rather what stole the show? »
05 Jun 2013
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? »
04 Jun 2013
Though 2013 is the bicentennial of the births of Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner, the releases of Cecilia Bartoli’s recording of Bellini’s Norma on DECCA, a new studio recording of Donizetti’s Caterina Cornaro from Opera Rara, and this première recording of Saverio Mercadante’s forgotten I due Figaro, suggest that this is the start of a summer of bel canto. »
03 Jun 2013
Wagner’s Lohengrin is not an unfamiliar visitor to the UK thanks,
in the main, to Elijah Moshinsky’s perennial production at Covent Garden. »
02 Jun 2013
Philip Glass's The Perfect American at the ENO in London is a visual treat, but the libretto is mind-numbingly anodyne. »
31 May 2013
Recording Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen is for a
record label equivalent to a climber reaching the summit of Mount Everest: it is the zenith from which a label surveys its position among its rivals and appreciates an achievement that can define its reputation for a generation. »
30 May 2013
Few people who love opera in general and bel canto in particular have never heard the comment made by Lilli Lehmann, veteran of the inaugural Ring at Bayreuth in 1876, that singing all three of Wagner’s Brünnhildes—in Die Walküre, Siegfried, and
Götterdämmerung, respectively, all of which she sang to great acclaim—pales in comparison with singing the title rôle in Bellini’s Norma. »
30 May 2013
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. »
30 May 2013
London’s two principal opera companies have offered a baffling
near-silence as their response to Wagner’s two-hundredth anniversary. »
30 May 2013
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. »
30 May 2013
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. »
30 May 2013
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. »
30 May 2013
Take a pair of peripatetic, sharp witted, libidinous dramatists with deeply
humanist hearts, add a brilliant, fun loving young composer, who believed in
forgiveness, and you end up with The Marriage of Figaro, a comic,
always relevant opera, which the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra presented
in Disney Hall, as part of its Mozart/DaPonte series. »
30 May 2013
Since receiving some fairly mixed reviews of their production of Mozart’s
Zaide at the 2010 Buxton Festival, Ian Page’s Classical
Opera seem to have focused their attention on recordings and themed
concert performances of 18th-century riches and rarities, »
25 May 2013
In May of 2013, the Spire Series at the First Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, Maryland, observed the fiftieth anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy by presenting a work dealing with the 1963 assassination. »
22 May 2013
Dulce Rosa, a brand new opera, had its world premiere Friday night, May 17, 2013 at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, California. It was produced by Los Angeles Opera, but staged in the smaller theater. »
22 May 2013
Richard Jones’ 2009 production of Verdi’s Falstaff translates the action from the first Elizabethan age to the start of the second. »
21 May 2013
Baritone Gareth John is rapidly accumulating a war-chest of honours. Winner of the 2013 Kathleen Ferrier Award, he recently won the Royal Academy of Music Patrons’ Award and was presented the Silver Medal by the Worshipful Company of Musicians. »
21 May 2013
This second revival of Jonathan Miller’s La bohème was the first time I had caught the production. »
21 May 2013
It’s Verdi’s bicentenary year and Rolando Villazón has two new CDs to plug — titled somewhat confusingly, ‘Villazón: Verdi’ and ‘Villazón’s Verdi’, the latter a ‘personal selection’ of favourite numbers performed by stars of the past and present. »
20 May 2013
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. »
20 May 2013
Paul Dukas’ Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, first heard in 1907, once seemed important. Arturo Toscanini conducted the Met premiere in 1911 with Farrar and later arranged some of its music for a 1947 recording with his NBC Symphony. »
19 May 2013
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. »
14 May 2013
“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. »
11 May 2013
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. »
11 May 2013
Once upon a time, Frankfurt Opera had the baddest ass reputation in Germany as “the” cutting edge producer of must-see opera. »
11 May 2013
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. »
11 May 2013
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. »
10 May 2013
Poor Aida! She never seems to have anything go her way. »
05 May 2013
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. »
04 May 2013
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. »
03 May 2013
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.
»
01 May 2013
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. »
28 Apr 2013
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.
»
25 Apr 2013
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. »
23 Apr 2013
Back for its fourth revival, David McVicar’s 2003 production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte has much charm, beauty and artistry. »
16 Apr 2013
The economics of the recording companies dictate much that is not ideal.
Wagner’s operas were not composed as they were in order to permit the
extraction of bleeding chunks, even on those occasions when strophic song forms
do occur. »
12 Apr 2013
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). »
11 Apr 2013
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. »
11 Apr 2013
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. »
11 Apr 2013
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. »
10 Apr 2013
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. »
05 Apr 2013
The Paris Opéra has not staged a full Ring Cycle since 1957, but its current season will conclude with a correction of this grand operatic gap. »
05 Apr 2013
Washington National’s 2012-2013 season continues this spring with a production of Giacomo Puccini’s first successful opera. »
05 Apr 2013
Italian composer Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968) wrote more than fifteen operas, of which almost none are staged today. »
04 Apr 2013
The Opera Group’s latest event, The Firework-maker’s Daughter by David Bruce and Glyn Maxwell is currently on tour and arrived at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre last night (3 April 2013). »
03 Apr 2013
Composer John Adams’ smashing, crashing and poignant The Gospel
According to the Other Mary, created in collaboration with Peter Sellars,
made its second appearance at Disney Hall with the Los Angeles Philharmonic
Orchestra. »
31 Mar 2013
“Gli arredi festivi giù cadano infranti, Il popol di Giuda di lutto s’ammanti!”. Verdi’s Nabucco at the Royal Opera House respected the spirit of the opera. »
26 Mar 2013
The Los Angeles Opera company opened its spring season in celebration of
Richard Wagner's bicentennial with the composer's The Flying Dutchman,
written in 1843. »
26 Mar 2013
Cruzar la Cara de la Luna (To Cross the Face of the Moon) has been performed in Houston and Paris. »
20 Mar 2013
Don’t miss UC Opera’s I Lombardi at the Bloomsbury Theatre. »
19 Mar 2013
Sets and costumes are gorgeous and the singing is good, but the libretto’s slow and continuously interrupted dramatic action grows tiresome »
18 Mar 2013
In the final of scene of Götterdämmerung in a new production at
the Staatsoper Berlin, Brünnhilde appears in a flowing pink gown just as the
music has modulated and penetrates the hall of the Gibichungs, represented by
rows of glowing translucent boxes that preserve the dismembered limbs of their
victims. »
15 Mar 2013
With Robert Carsen’s production of Falstaff almost inescapably
making the rounds of the world's operatic stages, it is well worth it to take
in another production altogether. »
15 Mar 2013
Rossini's “other” comic masterpiece of 1817 came into the world only a few weeks after the much better known The Barber of Seville. But it has had a place in the repertoire since its premiere. »
12 Mar 2013
Productions of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg are ambitious undertakings, if only for the number of performers involved and the duration of orchestral and vocal commitment. »
11 Mar 2013
San Francisco and Naples have much in common these days — streets with potholes, ever more gourmet pizzerias, homeless, etc., and, yes, Nicola Luisotti. »
11 Mar 2013
Giuseppe Verdi and his librettist, Salvatore Cammarano, based the opera on Antonio García Gutiérrez’s Spanish play El Trovador. »
10 Mar 2013
George Benjamin's Written on Skin sinks deeply into the psyche. A Protector wants brightly coloured images to display his power and wealth. »
09 Mar 2013
Jean-Baptiste Lully's Phaeton is rarely heard live in Britain, so this performance with a superlative cast was a special occasion. It was part of the Barbican Hall's continuing series of baroque, and particularly French baroque operas. »
06 Mar 2013
ENO’s advertising emphasises the ‘25th anniversary year’ of Jonathan Miller’s staging of The Barber of Seville. It holds the stage well enough without offering any especial insight — at least by now. »
05 Mar 2013
This prioduction of Wagner's Parsifal, directed by François Girard, premiered in Lyons last year. The Met, being a far wealthier house, was able to assemble a truly spectacular cast: Jonas Kaufmann, René Pape, Katarina Dalayman, Peter Mattei and Evgeny Nikitin. Success guaranteed, even if the production is European and modern. These performances set new benchmarks. This Parsifal will be the stuff of legend for decades to come. »
05 Mar 2013
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). »
05 Mar 2013
Puccini’s “shabby little shocker”, to quote Kerman, does not invite subtlety. For those who feel that opera — a hybrid art form encompassing all the arts and embracing all of life and love, transfiguration and tragedy — is ideally suited to depicting the excesses of human ecstasy and suffering, Tosca epitomises the immoderations of the genre. »
05 Mar 2013
Argentinean mezzo-soprano Bernarda Fink continued her series residency at the Wigmore Hall with an unusual programme of Italian baroque works, partnered by the Academy of Ancient Music, led by violinist Rodolfo Richter. »
02 Mar 2013
Samson and Delilah is the only opera by Camille Saint-Saens that is
still regularly performed. He had written two previous operas and would write
several more, along with a long list of instrumental pieces including The
Carnival of the Animals. »
02 Mar 2013
When opera companies arrange their seasonal schedules, one wonders how much
thought they give to Valentine’s Day. If it falls in the midweek, it is potentially a very propitious day for getting people out: that is, if the opera is right. »
26 Feb 2013
Michael Mayer’s glitzy neon lights production, set in Rat Pack-era Sin City, proves a fitting backdrop for an opera about a curse »
26 Feb 2013
Bavarian State Opera’s recent staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen was often a restless, even reckless affair, but there is no denying its substantial musical assets.
»
21 Feb 2013
Fun and Hugo Wolf ? Wolf's songs are the epitome of art song, due great reverence. But they're also vibrant with good-hearted wit. This latest concert in Julius Drake's ongoing "Perspectives" series at the Wigmore Hall brought together Sophie Daneman, Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake, all of whom have been working together for many years. The chemistry was almost palpable. »
17 Feb 2013
In 1704, 11 years after its first performance in 1693 before the royal court
of Louis XIV, and 17 years after the death of Lully — and at a time when
the relative merits of respective French and Italian aesthetics were constantly
and fiercely being debated — Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Médée was
condemned by the ‘Lullist’ faction, who were determined to defend
their leader’s guardianship of the tragédie en musique, as an
‘abomination’: hard, dry and characterised by excess. »
17 Feb 2013
With its staging of Alcina, Stuttgart Opera seems to set out to prove that George Friedrich Handel can be all ‘sexypants.’
»
14 Feb 2013
Sadistic revenge and sadistic challenge in equal parts. You know the story — if Oreste had not slaughtered his mother Elektra would have. And did over and over in nearly two hours of raving about killing her mother. Elektra is one of the repertory's more beloved operas. »
12 Feb 2013
Handel's Radamisto HWV 12a confirms the Barbican Hall as one of the finest places for baroque in London. Superb performances from David Daniels, Luca Pisaroni, and Patricia Bardon, with Harry Bicket conducting The English Concert from the harpsichord »
11 Feb 2013
Palm Beach Opera opened its new season with the opera that began it all, La Traviata. »
11 Feb 2013
For the first of her two February recitals at the Wigmore Hall, the
Argentinean mezzo-soprano Bernarda Fink was joined by the Hugo Wolf Quartett in
an eclectic, Italian-themed programme in which singer and instrumentalists
sculpted diverse and beautiful musical vistas and communicated a remarkably
coherent, shared vision. »
11 Feb 2013
This concert was part of a greater weekend of concerts at the Southbank
Centre looking at Paris during the second and third decades of the twentieth
century, the weekend itself part of the year-long Rest is Noise
season. »
10 Feb 2013
Joyce DiDonato brought her Drama Queens tour to the Barbican Hall last night, 6 February 2012. Accompanied by Il Complesso Barocco, directed by Dmitry Sinkovsky, she enabled us to hear a wide range of arias by mainly Italian baroque composers from Monteverdi to Handel, by way of Porta, Cesti, Orlandini and Hasse. »
10 Feb 2013
The fearsome Ottoman Turks had threatened the Austrian borders for centuries. But Mozart’s little singspiel makes light of this truly serious situation, and offers a quite enlightened resolution for the conflict as well. »
10 Feb 2013
Boasting one of France’s grandest opera houses (said to be the model for Paris’ Opéra Garnier) Toulon hosts a season of five operas — Aida, Butterfly and Flute are hand in hand with Carmen and, yes, Dialogues des carmélites. »
07 Feb 2013
Kasper Holten’s directorial debut in the Royal Opera House begins with
silence. »
06 Feb 2013
Born to a very poor family in 1797, Gaetano Donizetti was lucky enough to become the pupil of Johann Simone Mayr, the Maestro di Capella of his native city, who recognized his talent and made sure he received appropriate instruction. »
06 Feb 2013
The libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa for Giacomo Puccini’s opera Tosca is based on Victorien Sardou’s French play, La Tosca. »
06 Feb 2013
With a visually beautiful and dramatically honest staging, Netherlands Opera has made as compelling a case as I would imagine possible for Rossini’s grand opera Guillaume Tell. »
03 Feb 2013
An important new book on Italo Montemezzi sheds light on his opera Nave. The author/editor is David Chandler whose books on Alfredo Catalani have done so much to restore interest in the genre. »
02 Feb 2013
Recent seasons have seen a surge in so-called ‘Holocaust
operas,’ from Peter Androsch’s Spiegelrund, which
premiered in Vienna last week, to Mieczysław Weinberg’s The
Passenger, unveiled with a half-century of delay in Bregenz in 2010. »
02 Feb 2013
In remounting its 2001 production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel Lyric Opera of Chicago has demonstrated the timeless nature of the score and narrative as well as the ingenuity of the production with its thoughtful and touching updating to a twentieth-century milieu. »
01 Feb 2013
The Met’s opulent and well-sung Maria Stuarda cannot overcome its insipid libretto. »
31 Jan 2013
Soile Isokoski and Maria Viitasalo made a welcome return to theWigmore Hall, London. Their recital was a masterclass in what singing really should be about: not simply sound production, but the expression of meaning.
»
23 Jan 2013
Pelléas et Mélisande, in t-shirts and jeans, were out riding bicycles. They came upon a fountain. You know what happened. »
23 Jan 2013
Surveying British chamber and instrumental music written between the 1890s and WWII, the Nash Ensemble’s Wigmore Hall residency series, Dreamers of Dreams, has illuminated the creativity and originality of British musical life during this period, revealing the shared and the idiosyncratic preoccupations of composers; the intertwined biographies of musicians; the influence of key individual performers on repertoire, style and idiom; the dialogue between old and new; and the prevailing shadows of war and irreversible change. »
20 Jan 2013
The New Year 2013 is here and San Diego Opera will open its season at the
end of this month. The company will present four well known operas:
Gaetano Donizetti's The Daughter of the Regiment (La Fille du Regiment),
Camille Saint-Saëns' Samson and Delilah, Ildebrando Pizzetti's Murder in
the Cathedral (Assassinio nella Cathedrale) and Giuseppe Verdi's Aida
along with a Mariachi opera: Cruzar la Cara de la Luna, (To Cross the
Face of the Moon). »
20 Jan 2013
If, first time around, in 2008, The Minotaur offered the obvious excitement of the premiere, it was now noteworthy how quickly it had settled into repertory status. Not that it has yet been performed elsewhere than Covent Garden, though it should be as a matter of urgency, but that its 2013 outing proceeded with the apparent ease one might expect of, say, The Magic Flute or Carmen. That is surely testament both to the excellence of the performances we heard as well as to the stature of Birtwistle’s opera itself. »
19 Jan 2013
The Barbican is going have a bit of a baroque moment next month. Joyce DiDonato will be bringing her Drama Queens programme, then there will be complete performances of Handel's Radamisto and Lully's Phaeton.
»
16 Jan 2013
In its recent run of Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale Lyric Opera of Chicago has taken the 1973 production from Covent Garden, via Dallas Opera, and revivified it with the efforts of an excellent cast and the local directorial debut of British bass-baritone Sir Thomas Allen. »
15 Jan 2013
Once a mainstay of the repertory L’Italiana in Algeri now usually gives way to Il Turco in Italia when an opera company wants to give Il barbiere di Sivigllia and La cenerentola a rest. »
10 Jan 2013
The opening concert of the Wigmore Hall’s spring season exemplified the high standards of intelligent musicianship and imaginative programming so typical of the Hall’s artists. Soprano Carolyn Sampson and theorbo player Matthew Wadsworth presented a thoughtful, inventive programme, ‘Echoes of Venice’, alternating tender and impassioned songs of love with striking instrumental pieces. »
09 Jan 2013
Julius Drake's latest Hugo Wolf Songbooks recital at the Wigmore Hall featured Angelika Kirchschlager and Dietrich Henschel. These singers have very different voices indeed, so Drake's programme made the most of the contrast. »
09 Jan 2013
Graham Johnson chose the title "In the Shadow of the Opéra" for his recital at the Wigmore Hall, London, with Lucy Crowe and Christopher Maltman. Given the renaisaance in French opera, it's good that we should be thinking of the nature of French song and its relationship to French opera and culture. »
01 Jan 2013
Among the recent recordings of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, Valery Gergiev’s release on the LSO Live label is an excellent addition to the discography of this work. »
23 Dec 2012
Well, so many don’t nowadays, it appears to me, judging by the critical
reception of Robert le Diable at the ROH. Rum-ti-tum? We recall
Macbeth, Rigoletto, Trov and even Trav being characterised
thus, popular fare but risible or blush- making, yet those works now command
the highest respect. »
17 Dec 2012
Wintery weather in London for Florian Boesch's Schubert Winterreise at the Wigmore Hall. But what bliss to hear an austere interpretation that challenged assumptions ! »
16 Dec 2012
Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt op 23 is rarely heard in full, though the Suites thereon are ubiquitous. At the Barbican Hall in London, Grieg's incidental music for Henrik Ibsen's play was heard complete, enhanced by incidental speech. »
14 Dec 2012
This recital, which focused on a narrowly specific time and place —
1888-1933 Vienna — paradoxically illuminated not only the musical scope and
richness of that epoch but also, as Renée Fleming notes in her prefatory programme article, the extraordinary extent of the diversity, transformation and flux, both historical and cultural, that characterised the era. »
14 Dec 2012
Director David Alden’s confusing production concepts in Verdi’s A
Masked Ball may make you wonder whether you came to the right party »
10 Dec 2012
The live HD simulcast of Mozart’s final operatic effort, set in ancient Rome, reached friends, Romans and countrymen the world over »
09 Dec 2012
Why was Giacomo Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable an overwhelming success in its time ? The Royal Opera House production suggests why: it's a cracking good show! Extreme singing, testing the limits of vocal endurance, and extreme drama. Robert le Diable is Faust, after all, not history, and here its spirit is captured by audacious but well-informed staging. Listen with an open mind and heart and imagine how audiences in Meyerbeer's time might have imagined the madness and magic that is Robert le diable. »
07 Dec 2012
Manitoba Opera launched its celebratory, all-Verdi 40th anniversary season with the Italian master’s Rigoletto that still rattles the soul with its tale of revenge, murder, deceit and heart-wrenching pathos. »
07 Dec 2012
The Nash Ensemble’s final contribution to the Wigmore Hall’s Britten centenary series, ‘Before Life and After’, presented works for soloists and strings. »
06 Dec 2012
‘Canticle’ is the term Britten used to denote an extended setting of a text of spiritual substance. »
05 Dec 2012
They say that there’s nothing worse than a musically-obtuse staging of any opera to put a rookie opera-goer off a composer (or even opera itself) for life. »
29 Nov 2012
Vladimir Jurowski said all the right things during a brief address at the opening of the concert. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony should not be regarded as the climax of the performance, but as the fifth movement in a single work, whose theme was human suffering and the strength of the human spirit, never quashed by the former. »
28 Nov 2012
A beautiful, blingless Butterfly. How else to describe the pleasures of four glorious voices singing Puccini’s heart breaking, passionate melodies without igniting romantic sparks? »
27 Nov 2012
Haydn’s settings of the Mass ought to be heard incessantly, in churches and in the concert hall. »
24 Nov 2012
Drawing on the dark viciousness and bitter malevolence of Prosper Mérimée’s ethnographical novella, Calixto Bieito’s Carmen rejects any notion of flamboyant exoticism and alluring eroticism, and presents us instead with a sordid twilight zone of sexual violence and brutal malice. »
23 Nov 2012
French composer Charles Gounod wrote his five-act opera Roméo et Juliette to a libretto that Jules Barbier and Michel Carré based on William Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. »
23 Nov 2012
Extraordinary diva, Angela Gheorghiu pulled out of opening night after act one. It was news when she made it to the end of the second performance. Here is what happened at the third performance. »
21 Nov 2012
Jeanne D’Arc—Szenen aus dem Leben der Heiligen Johanna, the last stage work of the German composer Walter Braunfels, documents a passage in music history that has only recently begun to break through the surface. »
21 Nov 2012
Wozzeck Wozzeck, Wozzeck: The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Laureate
Conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, now Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor to the London’ Philharmonia Orchestra, is touring the United States with a program that includes three staged performances of Alban Berg’s opera, Wozzeck. »
21 Nov 2012
The Nash Ensemble's series at the Wigmore Hall, "Dreamer of Dreams" continued its survey of British music in the first half of the 20th century with an intriguing programme. Many underlying themes, and thoughtful juxtapositions. »
18 Nov 2012
Who is Patricia Racette? Sexually ripe Nedda, maternal Cio-Cio-San, neurotic Sister Angelica? But now the jealous Tosca? And without question Mme. Racette has again proven herself the Puccini heroine par excellence of this moment. »
16 Nov 2012
Operatic train wreck in San Francisco, hopes crushed for 3000 opera-goers, impresario’s grand scheme derailed. »
16 Nov 2012
While not unknown, the songs of Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871-1942) deserve to be heard more frequently. »
16 Nov 2012
Recorded on 5 and 6 May 2008 and 17 and 18 January 2009 at the Lisztzentrum (Raiding, Austria), this recent Bridge release makes available the piano-vocal versions of three song cycles by Gustav Mahler, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Rückert-Lieder, and Kindertotenlieder performed by mezzo-soprano Hermine Haselböck, accompanied by Russell Ryan. »
16 Nov 2012
One of the main reasons for interest in the Royal Opera’s latest revival of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore was that tenor Roberto Alagna had chosen to return to the role of Nemorino. Though he had sung Nemorino earlier in his career, he had never sung the role at Covent Garden. The other cast members were of a high order too, with Alexandra Kurzak as Adina, Ambrogio Maestri as Dulcamara and Fabio Capitanucci as Belcore. So plenty of reasons for seeing the revival, which I caught on opening night 13 November 2012.
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16 Nov 2012
The Wigmore Hall Celebration of Mendelssohn Song series culminated in a recital of works by Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn and by Robert and Clara Schumann. The programme was very well chosen because Felix, Fanny, Robert and Clara knew each other.. »
14 Nov 2012
At this famous bastion of intellect the biggest drama was the parking. Though the football stadium may have been stuffed, Zellerbach Hall was not. »
13 Nov 2012
In its current production of Simon Boccanegra Lyric Opera of Chicago draws on vocal strengths as well as musical and stage direction that do honor to Giuseppe Verdi’s masterpiece of political and emotional intrigue in fourteenth-century Genoa. »
10 Nov 2012
Contraltos rarely achieve the acclaim and renown of sopranos. Assigned few leading roles in opera, they are condemned to playing the villain or the grandmother, or to stealing the castrati’s trousers in en travesti roles. »
10 Nov 2012
Wexford Opera’s 2012 trio of rarities, seen on the opening three nights of the Festival, spanned a mere twenty years but offered operatic idioms ranging from verismo to pantomime, operetta to Wagnerian love-death apotheosis. »
10 Nov 2012
Following their 2011 Decca recording of Striggio’s Mass in 40 Parts (1566), I Fagiolini continue their quest to unearth lost treasures of the High Renaissance and early Baroque, with this collection of world-premiere recordings, ‘reconstructions’ and ‘reconstitutions’ of music by Giovanni and Andrea Gabrieli, Monteverdi, Palestrina, and their less well-known compatriots Viadana, Barbarino and Soriano. »
10 Nov 2012
Italo Montemezzi’s great “lost” epic opera, La Nave, was heard on 31 October for the first time since 1938, leaving an enthusiastic New York audience wondering why on earth it had been neglected for so long. »
10 Nov 2012
Marking Oliver Knussen’s sixtieth birthday came a BBC Total Immersion
weekend at the Barbican: a double-bill of Knussen’s two operas written in
collaboration with Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are and
Higgledy Piggledy Pop! on Saturday, followed by a day of two chamber
concerts, a film, and an orchestral concert conducted by the composer himself
on Sunday. »
10 Nov 2012
After a slow, long period of gestation, commencing with a short dramatization at Reigate Priory in 1906 and spanning more than 40 years, the first performance of Vaughan Williams’ The Pilgrim’s Progress took place at Covent Garden on 26 April 1951, as part of the Festival of Britain. »
01 Nov 2012
An intriguing blend of old and new marked the tenth anniversary of the
British vocal group, Exaudi, juxtaposing the adventurous intricacies and
affectations of the late-sixteenth century with the virtuosic refinements of
today’s avant garde. »
28 Oct 2012
Every major opera company needs a production of La bohème. It is one of the operas which has the potential to attract everyone, the work which will tempt the occasional opera goer into the theatre. »
27 Oct 2012
The opening images of Richard Strauss’s Elektra in its new production at Lyric Opera of Chicago establish a tension persisting until the final chords of the score indeed signal a resolution of this familial tragedy. »
27 Oct 2012
Netherlands Opera is surely to be numbered among the world’s most adventurous international companies. »
27 Oct 2012
Exquisite pianissimos, sumptuous climaxes, gigantic fortes, insistent horns, sugary winds, tremulous brass, blasting trumpets, whispering strings, pulsating oboes, more gigantic fortes, even more sumptuous climaxes. »
24 Oct 2012
Parsifal, with its heavy dose of religiosity and strains of racial supremacy, remains at once the most mystical and historically burdened of Wagner’s operas. »
23 Oct 2012
Some especially puerile, needlessly irritating, marketing, involving
pictures of condom packets — oddly chosen in so many ways, since few
people find contraceptive especially erotic, and Don Giovanni would seem an
unlikely candidate to have employed them — had attended the run-up to this
revival of Rufus Norris’s production of Don Giovanni. »
21 Oct 2012
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Mozart and Salieri (1897) received its first ever performance at the Royal Opera House as the highlight of Meet The Young Artists Week at the Linbury Studio Theatre.
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20 Oct 2012
An opera called Where the Wild Things Are based on a libretto by Maurice Sendak may sound like a mere treat for children, but when paired with the music of Oliver Knussen, as performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in a new and unique production by Netia Jones, it makes for a forty minute joy ride into fantasy land for adults as well. »
19 Oct 2012
What might a Woody Allen treatment involving opera read like? Tosca, third act — the firing squad lets loose shrapnel from a malfunctioning prop carbine, verily cutting into the Cavaradossi. »
19 Oct 2012
The role of Lucia in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor was written for Fanny Tacchinardi Persiani who lived from 1812 to 1867. »
18 Oct 2012
The first of four concerts in Jonathan Biss’s ‘Schumann: Under the influence’ series at the Wigmore Hall was a focused, intelligent and, at times, sensuous and illuminating, evening of music-making. »
17 Oct 2012
Labelled a “parable of oppression” by the late musicologist, Philip Brett, Britten’s provincial comedy, Albert Herring, is a tough nut to crack. »
12 Oct 2012
Frankfurt Opera’s adventurous season had a notable beginning with a luminous staging of Samuel Barber’s seldom heard Vanessa. »
12 Oct 2012
Forget Herman Melville, forget struggling with deep human complexities. At least those that possessed nineteenth century Americans. »
10 Oct 2012
Lucky Angeleno opera lovers! In anticipation of the Giuseppe Verdi’s bicentennial (it will occur in 2013) Los Angeles Opera treated its patrons to a unique and musically thrilling performance of I Due Foscari, the sixth of the composer’s twenty-six operas. »
10 Oct 2012
‘The last-ever performances of Nicholas Hytner’s production of The Magic Flute,’ claims the programme. »
09 Oct 2012
In our era of minimal cultural restraints Don Giovanni has been the opera of choice for presenting dissolution on stage. Rape, oral sex, drug use and urination have been portrayed to Mozart's melodies. »
09 Oct 2012
Give me good verses, I’ll give you good music, said Bellini to his librettist Felice Romani. Give me a good director and I’ll give you good opera surely thought San Francisco Opera general director David Gockley. »
05 Oct 2012
The first performances of Stockhausen’s Mittwoch — the world premiere took place on Mittwoch 22 August, the composer’s birthday, whilst I attended the last of four performances on Samstag — could hardly have failed to be an ‘event’ of the highest order: the last of the Licht cycle, in duration roughly twice the length of Wagner’s Ring, to receive its first full performance, though it was the sixth of the seven days to be composed. »
05 Oct 2012
“Two classic French comedies, one wardrobe…” was Bampton Classical Opera’s billing for this amusing double bill and, with typically wry wit, director Jeremy Gray duly placed a shabby-chic armoire centre-stage and made it the location of some Cherubino-Countess-style confusions and Goldoni-esque farce. »
05 Oct 2012
Frank Bridge (1879-1941) was a professional violinist and violist, a talented conductor, a versatile composer and skilled teacher; yet he remains something of an enigma and his music relatively unknown. »
05 Oct 2012
During the years from 1890 to 1940, the so-called ‘land without music’ witnessed a remarkable outpouring of chamber and instrumental music. »
05 Oct 2012
W.A. Mozart, despite a historically antagonistic relationship with his city of birth, retains an omnipresence in Salzburg that emerges in full force with each iteration of the illustrious summer festival. »
05 Oct 2012
Cleopatra, one of few female seductresses in operatic history to emerge not only alive but empowered in the final act, is a fitting role for Cecilia Bartoli in her first season as artistic director of the Salzburg Whitsun Festival. »
04 Oct 2012
The Wigmore Hall 2012-3 season (see link below) started with a gala of glamour. Dmitri Hvorostovsky attracts patrons in jewels and designer gowns. »
04 Oct 2012
The ENO gave the British premiere of Bohuslav Martinů's Julietta many years ago, so this new production was eagerly awaited. But what will audiences new to Martinů get from this production? It's a myth that the English language makes opera more accessible. That just means audiences focus on words, rather than really listening or understanding. »
02 Oct 2012
Welsh National Opera have revived Katie Mitchell’s 2003 production of Handel’s Jephtha, with Robert Murray in the title role and a new focus for the drama. »
28 Sep 2012
Four Rigolettos in nine days (for this critic), of twelve Rigolettos in 24 days (are these world records?). »
28 Sep 2012
John Adams’s Nixon in China has become one of the most successful operas in the late 20th/early 21st century wave of post-modernist attempts to revitalise the operatic tradition. It has even started its own sub-genre, the so-called CNN opera. »
28 Sep 2012
Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s visit to the Proms has become a much anticipated annual event. This year on 28 August, they brought Michael Grandage’s new production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment conducted by Robin Ticciati, who takes over as musical director at Glyndebourne in 2014. »
28 Sep 2012
The ghost of Peter Pears may no longer hover in the wings, but in an age when ‘defining’ interpretations by the likes of Jon Vickers and Philip Langridge still linger powerfully in collective audience memories, Stuart Skelton’s interpretation of Crabbe’s problematic fisherman is assuming a striking individuality and impact. »
27 Sep 2012
The venerable Santa Fe Opera served up a richly eclectic mix of high-caliber offerings that surely is one of their best festivals in recent seasons.
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28 Aug 2012
Ciro in Babilonia Matilda di Shaban and Il signor Bruschino in Rossini land. »
28 Aug 2012
It is difficult to speak with excessive enthusiasm of the programming of a Salzburg Festival that included both Carmen and La bohème, though it would subsequently be redeemed in part by a staging of Die Soldaten. »
24 Aug 2012
Eternal Echoes is an album of khazones [Jewish cantorial music] for cantorial soloist, solo violin and a blended instrumental ensemble comprising a small orchestra and the Klezmer Conservatory Band. »
24 Aug 2012
It was fitting that in this Year of Creative Scotland, the Edinburgh International Festival should honour James MacMillan’s contribution to Scottish musical life with the premiere of a new work. »
20 Aug 2012
Impresaria Francesca Zambello kept up her seemingly tireless process of rejuvenating the Glimmerglass Opera Festival with an ambitious, nay downright risky repertoire choice. »
20 Aug 2012
When announced in November, this was trailed as the original version of Ariadne auf Naxos, a rare treat indeed. »
20 Aug 2012
At the Salzburg Festival, Riccardo Muiti conducted Liszt’s Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe and Berlioz’s Messe solonnelle. »
14 Aug 2012
Michael Tilson Thomas’s recording of Mahler’s Third Symphony is an outstanding contribution to the composer’s discography. »
14 Aug 2012
Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder is conceived as cosmic panorama. King Waldemar curses God and is himself cursed, doomed to ride the skies forever, inspiring awe and horror. »
13 Aug 2012
The massed forces of the 600+ singers and players assembled for this exciting performance of Berlioz’s gargantuan Requiem (Grande messe des morts) made for an impressive visual spectacle in the vast high Victorian Royal Albert Hall. »
12 Aug 2012
The Edinburgh International Festival, in partnership with Opera North, presented Janáček’s The Makropulos Case at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre. »
11 Aug 2012
The Edinburgh International Festival got off to a rousing start with Frederick Delius, A Mass of Life, rarely heard because it's scored for huge forces. »
10 Aug 2012
Oliver Knussen burst into British music with an unprecedented flourish. In 1967, the London Symphony Orchestra premiered Knussen’s First Symphony, with István Kertész scheduled to conduct. »
05 Aug 2012
Surrealist fantasy with wit and style! L'heure espagnole and L'enfant et les sortilèges, the Ravel Double Bill at Glyndebourne, mixes charm, intelligence and nightmare. »
03 Aug 2012
Bach probably never intended the full Mass in B Minor to be performed, so it is tricky to talk about what forces he meant it to be performed by. But the Kyrie and Gloria certainly were sent by Bach to the Royal Court at Dresden (which was Roman Catholic), and these movements could be used in the Lutheran Church as well. »
02 Aug 2012
In November 1938 a young Polish Jew, Herschel Grynsban, driven to desperation and despair by the Nazi persecution of his mother, shot a minor German diplomat in Paris. The Nazis retaliated with one of the most savage, vicious pogroms experienced up to that time. A Child of our Time, composed during 1938-41, was Michael Tippett’s musical response to this contemporary tragedy and his attempt to comprehend its universal and eternal relevance. »
02 Aug 2012
Santa Fe, NM : It is not unusual for Santa Fe Opera to produce little known or
rarely heard operas in their enduring devotion to both unusual and ‘lost’ repertory, as well as commissioned and contemporary works. But is it unusual - very - for two such mountings in one season to be smash hits. Santa Fe lately enjoyed two such successes, graced by elevated musical and performance quality, and strong audience acceptance.
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02 Aug 2012
The gifted Polish composer Karol Szymanowski wrote his three-act King Roger, in the 1920's. It is an allegorical tale of honor vs. pleasure set to quite beautiful music, especially in the orchestral writing, which Santa Fe chose to play in the same season as the Rossini in a wide tip of the hat to unknown but worthy repertory. »
01 Aug 2012
This was unquestionably the best all-round performance I have yet seen from Opera Holland Park, staging and musical performances alike often putting august metropolitan houses from around the world to shame. »
30 Jul 2012
Although John Cage’s Seven Haiku for piano are all about chance and accident, this final concert in Ian Bostridge’s Ancient and Modern series was a masterpiece of meticulous planning and execution. »
30 Jul 2012
Few composers seem as remote and yet as necessary to our age as Beethoven, and perhaps the symphonic Beethoven in particular. Irony is a foreign word to him; blazing affirmation and indeed intensity of struggle seem too much for us. »
27 Jul 2012
Pierre Boulez Le marteau sans maître is important as Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, says conductor François-Xavier Roth, who conducted it with members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in BBC Prom 17. »
23 Jul 2012
Hearing The Trojans in concert at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the Proms was, for me at least, a much happier experience than when it laboured under the crowd-pleasing would-be-musical-comedy served up by David McVicar’s production for the Royal Opera. »
22 Jul 2012
“It is as sunny as the composer’s garden at Busetto, clear as crystal in construction, tender and explosive by turns, humorous and witty without a touch of extravagance or a note of vulgarity.” So wrote Charles Stanford on the occasion of the first performance of Verdi’s final opera, in 1893. »
20 Jul 2012
The Royal Opera House’s Jette Parker Young Artists programme is celebrating the 10th anniversary of their annual Summer Performance. »
19 Jul 2012
Rare, very rare repertory that is not even opera stole the show at the sixty fourth Aix Festival. »
18 Jul 2012
You pay your money, you takes your chances — that is festival life at its best. Sometimes it pays off and sometimes it doesn’t. The fun is in the risk, so the riskier the better.
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18 Jul 2012
Seriousness, elegance and insight characterised this recital of nineteenth-century German song in which Christoph Prégardien and his accompanist, Julius Drake, conducted a moving musical dialogue, perfectly matching each other in the depiction of unbending obsession and unfulfilled aspiration. »
17 Jul 2012
21st-century opera played on period instruments; a ‘drama-less’ opera; a Dali-esque crimson chaise longue, stranded on the platform of the Royal Albert Hall. »
15 Jul 2012
Elijah Moshinsky’s Otello, first seen at Covent Garden in 1987,
and revived numerous times with a range of stellar casts, may be traditional
and conservative, even — excepting the thunderous opening storm scene —
somewhat uninventive; »
11 Jul 2012
Paris Opéra seems to have saved the best for last as they wind up the current season with a trio of diverse and well-judged productions. »
09 Jul 2012
Not about tattoo art, not an evocation of the Holocast, and let us not even try to put our finger on what it is about. »
09 Jul 2012
Ian Bostridge’s thought-provoking ‘Ancient and Modern’ project at the
Wigmore Hall is drawing to a close and this penultimate instalment brought
together Renaissance sensuality and Neo-classical restraint in a meticulously
executed performance. »
02 Jul 2012
Embodying a range of iconic female characters from history, literature and song — both the ‘good’ and the ‘not-so-good’ — Susan Graham delivered a wonderfully suave and entertaining performance before a delighted Wigmore Hall audience. »
02 Jul 2012
Perfection. A seldom used term in critiques of opera performances. There it was, almost (and will be, maybe). »
28 Jun 2012
Based on performances given in Summer 2010 at the Lucerne Festival, this recording of Beethoven’s Fidelio is an admirable recording that captures the vitality of the work as conducted by Claudio Abbado. »
28 Jun 2012
Stanisław Moniuszko (1819-1872) was one of the most popular composers of his day in Poland, and of the many works he wrote for the stage, two are performed from time to time, Halka (1848) and Strazny dwór [The Haunted Manor] (1865). »
28 Jun 2012
The Polish alto Jadwiga Rappé is a familiar voice in various stage and concert works, and the recent release of a selection of songs by Stanisław Moniuszko (1819-1872) is an opportunity to hear her performing artsongs. »
27 Jun 2012
Forget about picking a desert island opera, I want Opera Theatre of St. Louis as my desert island opera company.
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27 Jun 2012
A sensational Les Troyens at the Royal Opera House, London. Berlioz, who understood theatrical gestures so well, builds his opera around the most audacious dramatic device in ancient history: the Trojan Horse. »
26 Jun 2012
First staged at Manchester’s 2011 international festival, Dr Dee
is a theatrical work based on the life of Renaissance cosmographer and
charlatan, John Dee. »
26 Jun 2012
At the Wigmore Hall, there’s long been a tradition of Swedish song. We’ve heard many of the greats, Anne Sofie von Otter, Barbara Bonney and others. Miah Persson and Roger Vignoles are in this constellation. »
26 Jun 2012
Billy Budd, foretopman — and self-styled ‘King of the Birds’ — may yearn for premonition to captain of the mizzen top, but there few spirits that fly afloat or soar in David Alden’s dark, oppressive new production of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd. »
15 Jun 2012
A feast for the eyes, a feast for the ears, a Flute from America’s heartland that goes directly to your heart. »
15 Jun 2012
Oliver Knussen’s two operas based on books by Maurice Sendak opened this year’s Aldeburgh Music Festival in exuberant style.
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13 Jun 2012
Fanfares that celebrate soldiers with plumed helmets by a composer who donned a helmet (metaphorically) — Verdi the operatic father of the Risorgimento! »
11 Jun 2012
Are my expectations too high when it comes to Mozart’s operas in general,
and to Così fan tutte in general? Probably. Should they be?
Certainly. »
09 Jun 2012
John Adams’ Nixon in China is an amazing, riveting piece of music, and compelling theater to boot.
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09 Jun 2012
Over 60 composers (including Beethoven) wrote music inspired by Metastasio’s L’olimpiade. »
09 Jun 2012
The pavilion at Garsington Opera at Wormsley is stunningly beautiful. Just being there is an experience, which is why the social aspect is so rewarding. »
08 Jun 2012
There are many different ways to analyze the health of New York City. My personal measurements judge the town thus: How many aspiring artsy kids are forced to share a single apartment in an outer borough while they “find themselves” and how many small but immensely able opera companies are functional at any given time. »
05 Jun 2012
“I can guess what you are hiding.
Bloodstain on your warrior’s weapons.
Blood upon your crown of glory.
Red the soil around your flowers.
Red the shade your cloud was throwing.
Now I know it all, oh, Bluebeard.” »
05 Jun 2012
The Los Angeles opera company ended its 2011-2012 season with Giacomo
Puccini’s long-loved La Bohème, in a long-lived production. What is
it about this opera that keeps old loves alive? »
04 Jun 2012
Detlev Glanert’s Caligula at the ENO shows how powerful modern opera can be. Caligula was a tyrant, but this opera isn’t sensationalist. »
04 Jun 2012
Kudos to the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association and Gustavo Dudamel for their courageous plan to present semi staged performances of the Mozart/Da Ponte trilogy of Italian operas with the assistance of outstanding set and costume designers and directors. »
04 Jun 2012
In David McVicar’s staging of Strauss’s disturbing opera, first seen at
Covent Garden in 2008 and now enjoying its second revival, Salome’s descent
down the Stygian staircase is a literal drop into a subterranean slaughterhouse
and an ethical fall into the delights and depravity of her of burgeoning yet deadly sexuality.
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04 Jun 2012
Donizetti’s Maria Padilla received a concert performance with the Chelsea Opera Group. »
04 Jun 2012
A fascinating evening of arias and readings on the theme of Handel’s “rival queens”, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni.
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04 Jun 2012
Canadian Opera Company’s diverse May offerings included some superlatively sung Handel, a galvanizing star turn from a rising tenor talent, and a well-matched veristic double bill of tragedy and comedy. »
31 May 2012
Yannis Kokkos originally directed and designed Tristan und Isolde as a co-production for Welsh National Opera and Scottish Opera nearly 20 years ago. The production’s latest revival, directed by Peter Watson, was premiered at the Wales Millennium Centre on 19 May 2012. »
30 May 2012
Glyndebourne’s 2012 season started in great style with Leoš Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen. Its rapturous reception would suggest that this could become a Glyndebourne perennial. »
25 May 2012
Originally released on multiple discs in 1981 this reissue on two CDs is a comprehensive collection of art songs by Italian and French composers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. »
22 May 2012
Iestyn Davies’ Wigmore Hall recital, ‘History Repeating’, may have explored various composers’ engagement with, and reinterpretation and reinvigoration of, music of the past, but Davies himself is very much the countertenor of the moment, and undoubtedly an exciting and fulfilling future lies ahead. »
21 May 2012
You never can tell. I would never have predicted which opera would be my favourite of the seven operas programmed this season by the Canadian Opera Company. »
19 May 2012
The Met saved the best of the season for the end of it, revivals of their first-rate productions of two twentieth-century masterpieces, Jánaček’s Makropoulos Case and Britten’s Billy Budd. »
19 May 2012
It is not long into Act One of Mignon at Geneva’s Grand Theatre when Diana Damrau glides on stage as Philine, commands our rapt attention, and sweeps all before her. »
17 May 2012
Véronique Gens’s recital at the Wigmore Hall, London, was an almost ideal distillation of the belle époque in song. »
12 May 2012
In this, the second of two LSO concerts in which Péter Eötvös replaced
Pierre Boulez, one continued to feel the loss of the latter in his repertoire,
yet one equally continued to value his replacement, very much his own
man. »
09 May 2012
An energetic and exceptionally entertaining production of Così fan tutte sung in English and set during World War II, when the Americans often got the girls. »
09 May 2012
Any performance of Philip Glass’ epic Einstein on the Beach (1976) is a major event. The work’s duration is around five hours and it is directed to be performed without interval (although see below — we had one). »
07 May 2012
Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’ classic play The Barber of
Seville, set by Rossini to perfectly paced and irresistibly comic music,
was first performed in Rome in 1816, and remains one of the world’s favorite
operas. »
02 May 2012
A robust Mimì and a self-regarding Rodolfo impart a distinctive flavour to this full-throttled version of John Copley’s evergreen La bohème. »
02 May 2012
This year’s Kathleen Ferrier Awards final was both a competition and a
celebration, marking as it did the centenary anniversary of the great singer’s birth. »
01 May 2012
Manitoba Opera laid aside all stereotypes about opera being stuffy and inaccessible with its feel-good production of Donizetti’s 1840 comic opera Daughter of the Regiment. »
01 May 2012
ENO’s peculiar decision not to stage any Wagner during its 2012-13 season, that is the season in which the greater part of Wagner’s bicentenary falls, is at least mitigated by a new production of The Flying Dutchman during this preceding season. »
01 May 2012
The double bill of Zemlinsky’s A Florentine Tragedy with
Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, currently being presented by the Canadian Opera Company, is a marriage made in heaven, a pair of complementary opposites who seem to belong together. »
26 Apr 2012
Massenet’s Manon succeeds in the theater when the soprano has
a real sense of the role and how she wants to present it. »
26 Apr 2012
Croatian National Opera, in collaboration with Würzburg’s (Germany) Mainfranken Theater has made quite a forceful case for Parsifal.
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26 Apr 2012
It is Manon month in the Mid-Atlantic states. In New York, the Met is presenting Massanet’s take, while Opera Company of Philadelphia has just opened Puccini’s version: his first successful opera, Manon Lescaut. »
26 Apr 2012
Los Angeles lieder lovers were treated to two extraordinary Schubertian
journeys on April 16th and 18th when bass-baritone Matthias Goerne partnered
with Christian Eschenbach performed the song cycles, Die schöne
Müllerin and Winterreise, as part of the Los Angeles
Philharmonic’s celebration of the composer’s 215th birthday. »
26 Apr 2012
The unfashionableness of Der Freischütz in England is a little baffling. In its day, not only was the opera celebrated across Germany, it soon conquered other European stages and indeed theatres worldwide. »
25 Apr 2012
An exciting contribution to the discography of this popular opera, the live performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome from the Festspielhaus at Baden-Baden is a compelling DVD. »
25 Apr 2012
The regiment marches onwards! »
19 Apr 2012
Lyric Opera of Chicago has begun with the current season’s production of Show Boat a series of musicals of the American theater to be featured in coming years. »
19 Apr 2012
When the ENO does really innovative work, it does so with style. Wolfgang Rihm’s Jakob Lenz may have taken 34 years to reach London fully staged, but this ENO production made such a strong impression that it might be years before it will be forgotten. »
19 Apr 2012
The Wigmore Hall Dvořák series culminated in a concert by Bernarda Fink and Roger Vignoles. »
19 Apr 2012
I have to rethink my week, because somehow I have to get to see Opera Atelier’s production of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Armide again. »
19 Apr 2012
It’s unclear whether Mozart composed this highly undramatic “dramatic action” when he was fifteen, for his kindly master Prince-Archbishop von Schrettenbach of Salzburg, or the following year for the newly-elected successor, Prince-Archbishop Colloredo, who, soon afterwards, had the young man literally kicked out of his service. »
16 Apr 2012
Edward Elgar was given a copy of Cardinal Newman’s ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ — a 900-line poem depicting the journey of an old man’s soul after death — as a wedding present in 1889. »
15 Apr 2012
Paris’ Opéra Comique has summoned forth a respectable (if spare) set design for Bluebeard’s Castle, but unfortunately the opera they were performing was Auber’s La Muette de Portici. »
13 Apr 2012
Assumptions about later Italian opera are dominated by Puccini, but Alfredo Catalani, born in the same town and almost at the same time, was highly regarded by their contemporaries. Two new books on Catalani could change our perceptions. »
13 Apr 2012
Sandrine Paiu and Roger Vignoles teamed up for the latest concert in Vignoles’s “Perspectives” series at the Wigmore Hall, London. »
13 Apr 2012
Released in late 2011, Deutsche Grammophon’s DVD of the new staging of Berg’s Lulu at the Gran Teatro del Liceu, Barcelona is an excellent contribution to the discography of this fascinating opera. »
13 Apr 2012
A recent release by the Metropolitan Opera, this two-disc set makes available on DVD the famous performance of Berg’s Lulu that was broadcast on 20 December 1980 as part of the PBS series “Live from the Met.” »
13 Apr 2012
Opera-goers have come to expect high quality opera as part of Sarasota Opera’s Winter Festival. »
12 Apr 2012
The Royal Opera House started doing opera and ballet broadcasts before many other houses, and is now expanding its schedule. On April 17th, Verdi’s Rigoletto is being streamed live in over 600 cinemas in 21 countries.
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02 Apr 2012
How would a period instrument specialist like John Eliot Gardiner approach Rigoletto, Verdi’s sordid tale? This was his first Rigoletto (though not his first Verdi); but he created it with great insight. »
31 Mar 2012
The novels of Sinclair Lewis once shot across the American literary skies like comets, alarming and fascinating readers of that era, but their tails didn’t extend far behind them. »
28 Mar 2012
Once the province of only the most dedicated opera fanatics, mid-20th century recordings of privately taped live performances have become more widely available. »
27 Mar 2012
For sixty years, the Chelsea Opera Group has adorned London opera life. It doesn’t do mass market, but focuses on unusual and obscure repertoire. This audience comes for the music! »
24 Mar 2012
Flute players in opera orchestra around the world must look forward to the frequent appearances of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, knowing that while the stage spotlight in the mad scene will be on the soprano, the orchestral spotlight will be on their instrument. »
24 Mar 2012
The performance at the Wigmore Hall of Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin by Florian Boesch and Malcolm Martineau was outstanding. Over several decades, I’ve heard hundreds of performances, but this was exceptionally perceptive. »
24 Mar 2012
The Barbican’s English oratorio series now reaches the twentieth century, with Tippett’s A Child of Our Time, though it will step back to The Dream of Gerontius next month. »
22 Mar 2012
The Los Angeles Opera, anticipating Benjamin Britten’s centennial gave
the composer, as well as its patrons, an early birthday present of performances
of his charming comic opera, Albert Herring. »
19 Mar 2012
A major part of the rejuvenation of opera in the 21st century is the cultivation of young singers. »
19 Mar 2012
Since his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1971, conductor James Levine has come to represent the house’s commitment to artistic excellence — reliable, professional, and immaculately presented. »
19 Mar 2012
You can’t keep a good opera buffa down. And Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale is about as good as opera buffa gets. »
19 Mar 2012
Two live camels with trainers in Egyptian garb were stationed in front of Phoenix’s Symphony Hall to publicize the opening of Arizona Opera’s new production of Aida. »
13 Mar 2012
An absurd plot has never stood in the way of a good opera. Unfortunately, Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune at the Royal Opera House isn’t much of an opera. »
12 Mar 2012
The cinema world has given us “star vehicle,” a term used to describe a movie that may not have the best script or direction but which suits a popular actor’s persona so well the film can fairly be called a successful entertainment. »
12 Mar 2012
For an operatic masterpiece The Barber of Seville is surprisingly tricky to do well, it is not one of those pieces which plays itself. »
09 Mar 2012
In this stimulating and uplifting performance, The Cardinall’s Musick, led by director Andrew Carwood, continued their comprehensive project to examine the works of one of England’s greatest composers — William Byrd (c.1540—1623). »
08 Mar 2012
The Barbican’s six-month series celebrating the English oratorio, has now reached Mendelssohn’s Elijah — or perhaps we should
follow the Victorians and refer to it as ‘the Elijah’, given that it was performed in English, in William Bartholomew’s translation. »
06 Mar 2012
Abduction from the Seraglio contains not a single ironic or cynical moment. Enlightened mercy and sincere love triumph totally over revenge, slavery and tyranny. »
05 Mar 2012
Two recent outings at the Paris Opéra might have been subtitled: “Max Bialystock is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.” »
05 Mar 2012
Right to the musical ‘score’ board: Zurich Opera stared down the mighty challenge posed by Rossini’s Otello ossia il moro di Venezia, and knocked it out of the ballpark. »
04 Mar 2012
Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa is not everyday repertory, nonetheless here in the south of France the Monaco production follows fairly closely (a couple of years) on the heels of the Peter Stein Mazeppa in Lyon. »
04 Mar 2012
André Previn’s leadership of the London Symphony Orchestra in the early 1970s resulted in some highly regarded recordings, including one of the classic accounts of Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony. »
01 Mar 2012
There were high hopes for the 2012 debut production of A Midummer Night’s Dream by the Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s Opera programme . »
01 Mar 2012
A perennial favorite among opera enthusiasts since its 1871 premiere in Cairo, Aida remains a popular work, and its strengths are apparent in the recent Decca DVD from the Metropolitan Opera, New York. »
29 Feb 2012
Sometime everything seems to go right. Just as the Los Angeles Opera Company
did last fall, it opened its spring season with a baritonal eponymous opera; this time, Giuseppe Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra. »
28 Feb 2012
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an interesting opera production will be met with incomprehension and lazy, philistine hostility by vast swathes of the audience in many, perhaps most, of the world’s ‘major’ houses, a truth that renders one all the more grateful for the Royal Opera showing the courage to stage this new — to London — production of Rusalka. »
28 Feb 2012
Welsh National Opera presented a rather undercooked account of Berlioz’s tricky opera, in a revival of Elijah Moshinsky’s classic production »
27 Feb 2012
Based on performances given on 2 and 3 March 2011 (at the Barbican, London), Valery Gergiev’s recording of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is an engaging and persuasive reading of the score. »
27 Feb 2012
John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer is on at the English National Opera, London. »
27 Feb 2012
Modern and historic responses to classical tragedy and myth formed the unifying focus for this latest stage of Ian Bostridge’s year-long ‘Ancient and Modern’ project at the Wigmore Hall. »
24 Feb 2012
When Captain Ahab sailed the Pequod into San Diego this week, he brought a new American opera with him. Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick is a stunning work likely to have universal appeal. »
24 Feb 2012
Is there somewhere in Italian opera repertory where, as a comic interlude, the portentous clichés of German opera come in for a skewering amid the luscious sunshine of Italianate lyricism? »
24 Feb 2012
Tenor Michael Spyres’ star is on the rise and his highly enjoyable debut recital disc offers ample proof as to why. »
24 Feb 2012
The last opera seria — Mozart’s late, austere masterpiece, and vividly brought it to life. »
24 Feb 2012
A breath-taking stage picture at curtain rise of Netherlands Opera's The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia indeed made us involuntarily gasp as one.
»
20 Feb 2012
Inaugurated in 1995, the Veronica Dunne International Singing Competition is a triennial competition, held in the National Concert Hall in Dublin, which takes place over a week in January. »
20 Feb 2012
Mark Elder and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment brought Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette to the Royal Festrival Hall. »
20 Feb 2012
In his memoirs, Five Thousand Nights at the Opera, Sir Rudolph Bing, general manager of the Met from 1950 to 1972, discusses the Met’s move from 39th street to its current home at Lincoln Center. »
20 Feb 2012
Erwin Schrott triumphed as Don Giovanni in the Mozart/da Ponte series at the Royal Opera House, overcoming the limitations of the staging.
»
17 Feb 2012
Critics. Can you get along without us? It is possible to reflect on this when the production of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale is shown on television tonight. »
17 Feb 2012
Henri Sauguet is not entirely unknown in opera circles — divas Regine Crespin, Felicity Lott, Nathalie Dessay and Leontyne Price have included his arias in their solo albums. Plus there is a recording of his 1954 opera-comique Les Caprices de Marianne. »
17 Feb 2012
In its current revival of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida Lyric Opera of Chicago approaches the challenges of the ambitious score with a cast well suited to the music and to the drama. »
16 Feb 2012
It was a performance of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville in the late 90’s that marked my first visit to the Met. »
16 Feb 2012
One of the guiding principles of the revisionist (if not intervisionist) school of opera directing commonly called “regie-theater” is that certain outdated dramatic conventions in the librettos of many great operas can actually interfere with a contemporary audience’s ability to perceive the true artistic worth of the work of art. »
15 Feb 2012
David McVicar’s production of The Marriage of Figaro, previously staged in 2006 (twice), »
13 Feb 2012
Ernani accosts us with the charm and the gaucherie of a provincial youth
without much experience as the host of a classy party. »
11 Feb 2012
In many respects, The Tales of Hoffmann and Richard Jones would seem a good fit. »
10 Feb 2012
Winnipeg music lovers were willingly transported back several centuries as
Daniel Taylor and Montreal-based Theatre of Early Music graced Westminster
United Church with a program of infrequently heard music. »
08 Feb 2012
Recorded on 14 June 1964 at the Großer Saal of the Musikverein, Vienna, as part of the Wiener Festwochen, this legendary performance of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde was released in 2011 on Deutsche Grammophon. »
08 Feb 2012
All the important directors pass through Lyon, so it was just a matter of time before British director David Pountney would be invited to stage a production. It was Puccini’s triptych. »
08 Feb 2012
In advance of the new Rusalka at the Royal Opera House, the Barbican and the BBC Symphony Orchestra brought an electrifying performance of Dvořák's The Jacobin to London. »
08 Feb 2012
If Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is arguably one of his more familiar pieces, live performances of the work can vary depending on the abilities of the performers to meet the various challenges of the piece. »
08 Feb 2012
English National Opera’s revival of Richard Strauss’s fin de
siècle Figaro is a heart-warming treat for a cold winter’s
night. »
08 Feb 2012
I failed to discern any rationale behind programming the Brecht-Weill ballet chanté with various works by Debussy, one orchestrated by Robin Holloway. »
06 Feb 2012
The magic was in the pit, not that all Monaco was not magical — on January 25 a yellow Lamborghini, a red Ferrari, a vintage Jaguar among other magnificent machines stood before the entrance to Monte-Carlo’s resplendent Casino cum transplendent 500-seat opera house. »
03 Feb 2012
Each year, the Wigmore Hall commemorates Franz Schubert’s birthday with a high profile recital. This year, Werner Güra and Roger Vignoles presented a recital which was a timely reminder of what Lieder performance should be. »
02 Feb 2012
The San Diego Opera Company opened its 47th season on Saturday, January 26th
with Richard Strauss’ Salome, a work that has something in it for
everyone: lust, love, lasciviousness, homosexuality, heterosexuality, homicide,
suicide, a voluptuous dance and quickie nudity. »
02 Feb 2012
Released in 2011, this disc reproduces a performance of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde that was recorded on 10 November 1989 at the Grzegorz Fitelberg Concert Hall, Katowice [Poland]. »
02 Feb 2012
Lyric Opera of Chicago’s recent revival of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte offered a production with vocal pairs carefully matched and dramatic representation expressing the varying shades of Mozart’s score. »
02 Feb 2012
British composer Jonathan Harvey’s Wagner Dream came to London four years after its premieres at the Holland Festival and in Luxembourg.
»
31 Jan 2012
For the first hour or so of the latest Opera Orchestra of New York venture, a concert performance of Wagner’s Rienzi, I often said to myself, This…isn’t so terrible. »
31 Jan 2012
Repeatedly revived since its final appearance in 1995, Jonathan
Miller’s Così fan tutte returned yet again to the Covent Garden
stage as the second part of the ‘Olympic’ cycle of Mozart-Da Ponte
collaborations. »
31 Jan 2012
A year or two back, Opera Lafayette, the Washington-based company that
specializes in eighteenth-century obscurités françaises, presented
Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny’s Le Magnifique, an
opéra-comique about a race horse. »
27 Jan 2012
Introducing the winter-spring season, ROH Chief Executive Tony Hall explains the (perhaps a tad spurious) Olympic ‘concept’ which has inspired the season’s programming, the five interlocking rings of the Olympic insignia motivating the performance of a series of works staged in ‘cycle form’. »
27 Jan 2012
Founded in 1984, the Basel Chamber Orchestra has developed a penchant for
programmes which combine the modern and unfamiliar with the traditional and
renowned. »
27 Jan 2012
Three La Bohèmes in ten days, a critic’s nightmare that was more fun than a barrel of monkeys. »
25 Jan 2012
This year is a big year for the Met. Of the seven new productions on the roster, two are the last two installments of a much-anticipated Robert Lepage Ring. »
25 Jan 2012
This buoyant, refreshing performance of Haydn’s late oratorio, The Seasons, by Paul McCreesh’s superb Gabrieli Consort and Players conjured
a calendric kaleidoscope of seasonal climes, from the warm bucolic breezes of spring to summer’s fierce suns and flashing storms, from autumnal harvests and hunts to the frozen mists and fiery hearth-sides of winter. »
25 Jan 2012
Composed during the spring hunting season of 1684, for a patron and performance venue unknown, Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s brief six-scene Opera de Chasse (‘Hunting Opera’), Actéon, has remained seldom performed and something of a mystery. »
25 Jan 2012
War and destruction is everywhere these days, not least in Pesaro where Graham Vick staged a lethal Mosé in Egitto last August, nor less so in San Francisco where baritone Thomas Hampson perished as Rick Rescorla in Heart of a Soldier last September. »
25 Jan 2012
Hugo Wolf is a hard sell. Technical expertise isn't enough. The secret to singing Wolf is expressing the unique personality in each song. Wolf, perhaps more than any other composer, creates miniatures that open out into mini-operas when performed well. »
23 Jan 2012
Richard Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos presents challenges in casting not only because of the vocal line and identity associated with individual characters but also because of its nature as a self-comment on the musical stage and the requisite dramatic skills thus needed. »
23 Jan 2012
What does it say about New York that, in the songs of the city commissioned by the Five Boroughs Music Festival and given performances in Brooklyn, Queens and, now, Manhattan, the poets (often the composers themselves) rarely refer to life in that central part of the city, Rodgers and Hart’s “isle of joy”? »
05 Jan 2012
This performance of La Traviata was the 454th at the Royal Opera House, and the first performance in the 3rd revival this season of Richard Eyre’s production. »
28 Dec 2011
Ruggero Leoncavallo’s name is forever tied to that of Pietro Mascagni. »
28 Dec 2011
In contrast to much music-making on the continent, English composers born in the last quarter of the sixteenth century seem to have embraced a notable degree of stylistic continuity. »
28 Dec 2011
Homage could take diverse forms in Counter-Reformation Rome, and this excellent recording by ensemble officium, Messa di Santa Cecilia, focuses on a particular instance that was interestingly polyvalent. »
23 Dec 2011
Perhaps it’s no accident that Graham Vick’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg returns to the Royal Opera House for the Christmas season. Red, green, gold, sumptuous colours that warm a long, grey evening. »
23 Dec 2011
This latest instalment of Ian Bostridge’s ‘Ancient and Modern’ series juxtaposed the tender melancholy of the Elizabethan age with the modernist anxieties of the early twentieth century, revealing both a sensitivity to textual nuance and profound human sensibilities which transcend temporal epochs. »
22 Dec 2011
2011 has been a good year for baritone Jonathan McGovern: 2nd prize at the Kathleen Ferrier Awards, the Karaviotis Prise at the Les Azuriales Ozone Young Artists Competition, and the John Meikle Duo Prize at the Wigmore Hall/Kohn Foundation International Song Competition are just some of the awards he has garnered. »
22 Dec 2011
In Wilhelm Weitsch’s well-known painting of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, the eldest son of Johann Sebastian seems far distant from the cantorial world of his father. »
19 Dec 2011
Jean-Philippe Rameau, an organist and music theoretician, was active for much of his life in musical centers distant from the cultural juggernaut of Paris. »
19 Dec 2011
In the first part of the seventeenth century, the north German city of Hamburg spawned an unusually rich organ culture, with Jacob Praetorius, the younger, and Heinrich Scheidemann both pupils of the famous Dutch organist, Jan Pieterzoon Sweelinck, as leading figures. »
18 Dec 2011
This recent recording of the men and boys from King’s College, Cambridge, is an anthology organized around the texts and themes of the liturgical year, a scheme that offers ample opportunity for diverse works—in that sense the recording feels something like a “sampler”—but a scheme that also reflects the real experience of the daily life of the choir which sings demanding choral services six days of the week in term time. »
16 Dec 2011
The Wigmore Hall marks the 75th anniversary of the death of Maurice Ravel with a series of concerts that run through to June 2012. »
16 Dec 2011
A self-published recording, baritone Randal Turner’s traversal of contemporary songs in English, Living American Composers, makes for a fine vocal calling card. »
16 Dec 2011
Combining innate musicianship and superb technique, Anne Schwanewilms showed once again that she can run the emotional gamut from light-hearted joy to deep anguish in this flawless performance with pianist, Charles Spencer. »
16 Dec 2011
In 1983, Karita Mattila was the first singer to win the Cardiff Singer of the World competition. »
13 Dec 2011
Buzz Lightyear Meets Hansel and Gretel! Most children who have grown up in
the Toy Story era know that toys come alive when left to their own
devices. »
13 Dec 2011
The English Oratorio season at the Barbican Hall, London continued with Gerald Finley and two very different approaches to Belshazzar’s Feast — William Walton and Jean Sibelius. »
13 Dec 2011
Paris Opera has lavished quite a monumental staging on Verdi’s musically rich (and Piave’s dramatically vapid) La Forza del Destino. »
13 Dec 2011
Soprano Felicity Lott has concentrated her career in her UK homeland and in Europe, although she certainly has had her share of US appearances. »
13 Dec 2011
Apparently the Aalto Theater didn’t get the memo that oratorios often make weak theatre pieces, since the company presented such a gripping dramatic case for Handel’s Hercules.
»
13 Dec 2011
Straight to the point: Netherlands Opera has mounted as luminous and emotionally engaging an Idomeneo as is imaginable. »
13 Dec 2011
More than a gala for Milan and for Italy, this wonderful Don Giovanni at Teatro alla Scala, Milan, was a gala for all the world, broadcast live internationally. »
09 Dec 2011
I have somehow managed to miss Sir Colin Davis’s London performances of L’Enfance du Christ, making it one of the final major Berlioz works I have heard in the flesh. »
06 Dec 2011
At the November 12, 2011 world premiere of Silent Night at the Ordway Theatre in St. Paul, a buzz of energy filled the audience. »
05 Dec 2011
Brad Mehldau seems to be the “go to” jazz pianist for classically trained singers who want to venture into other musical territory than opera and lieder. »
02 Dec 2011
At one point in The Met’s history, Faust was performed so frequently that one critic in mocking reference to Wagner’s opera house at Bayreuth coined the theater Faustophilhaus. »
02 Dec 2011
From the moment the curtain rose to reveal a loony bin instead of the 15th Century Inn of the libretto, it seemed likely the Flemish Opera was going to raise more questions than it answered about Tchaikovsky’s rarely performed The Enchantress.
»
02 Dec 2011
Richard Eyre’s 1994 staging of Verdi’s La Traviata may have been revived many times, but this production reveals striking new depths of interpretation. »
01 Dec 2011
Opera has never been an art form to hold anything back. But even within the
genre itself, Salome is — literally — one tough, depraved act to
follow. »
28 Nov 2011
Although François Couperin won his reputation as an esteemed composer at the
ostentatious and vainglorious court of Versailles, under the patronage of Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’, his work is often surprisingly discreet and intimate. »
27 Nov 2011
The swift return to the Coliseum of Catherine Malfitano’s production of Tosca, premiered in 2010, contrasts strongly with the increasingly disposable nature of many recent ENO productions. »
25 Nov 2011
Handel’s oratorio Saul was the first dramatic oratorio that he wrote with a strong libretto. »
25 Nov 2011
No cuts, not a single one, nearly four hours of non-stop arias, and its only hit tune happens within the first five minutes. »
23 Nov 2011
Opera North holds a special place in my affections: my first full opera in the theatre was the company’s Wozzeck, which I saw as a schoolboy at the Lyceum Theatre in Sheffield. »
22 Nov 2011
Imagine a tuneful eighteenth-century “ballad opera” of country
life, say Stephen Storace’s enduringly popular No Song No
Supper, cross it with Cavalleria Rusticana, throw in a bit of
Rocky for good measure, and you have some idea of Ralph Vaughan
Williams’s first opera, Hugh the Drover, a “Romantic
Ballad Opera.” »
20 Nov 2011
The magnificent David Hockney Turandot production burst again onto the War Memorial stage with a new cast and conductor that recaptured its potential to make this fairytale into great opera. »
18 Nov 2011
Lyric Opera of Chicago staged Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di
Lammermoor as its second production of the current season with Susanna
Phillips taking on the role of the heroine torn between romantic love and familial pressures. »
17 Nov 2011
If this generation were to stake a claim to its own classical vocal music “Golden Age,” Christine Brewer presents a strong case. »
15 Nov 2011
Deborah Warner’s new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is an evocative and lyrical depiction of elegiac passion. »
14 Nov 2011
They’re no longer just door-to-door missionaries with a science fiction theology and strange underwear! What with a presidential candidacy and a hit Broadway musical, the Mormons are having their breakout season in New York. »
14 Nov 2011
Déja vu. Well, sort of. Last time around (2006) there was a Carmen and then another who canceled leaving San Francisco Opera in the lurch. »
13 Nov 2011
For some years now the opera world has reveled in the appearance of many fine lyric tenors, with Juan Diego Florez leading the charge. »
13 Nov 2011
What could be more appropriate for the Samhain season than a return from
near-death? »
09 Nov 2011
For its first production of the new season, Jacques Offenbach’s
Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Lyric Opera of Chicago assembled a
distinguished roster of soloists with the Lyric Opera Orchestra under the direction of Emmanuel Villaume. »
09 Nov 2011
The operas of a composer born before the settlement of Jamestown face dim prospects of getting staged at the larger American houses. »
09 Nov 2011
Love and gloom at the Los Angeles Opera. »
05 Nov 2011
In 2006 classical music lost one of its great singers — American mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, taken at the height of her career. »
05 Nov 2011
Bellini’s La sonnambula does not have the most gripping or
convincing of opera plots: a young girl sleepwalks into a stranger’s room, where she is discovered by her fiancé; disbelieving her pleas of innocence, he jilts her and plans to wed another; but, she is vindicated when she is spied on a nocturnal wander, and the lovers are reconciled. »
05 Nov 2011
Bartók’s only opera, a masterpiece to rank with other sole works in
the genre such as Fidelio and Pelléas et Mélisande, was
chosen for the climax of the Philharmonia’s year-long series,
‘Infernal Dance: Inside the World of Béla Bartók’. »
05 Nov 2011
Wexford Festival Opera made a boldly calculated choice sixty years ago when it eschewed bread-and-butter titles, and instead raided the dusty closet where forgotten pieces by some famous (and mostly non-) composers were (at best) consigned to history. »
04 Nov 2011
There are some literary texts which, by dint of their intense compression of
incident, their creators’ firm control of structure, and the precision of
linguistic nuance, do not naturally seem to lend themselves to operatic
treatment. »
01 Nov 2011
It’s very unusual for the Met these days—or any major opera house, in any era—to present a glossy new production with two different stars in the leading role. »
01 Nov 2011
Daring dramas which probe dark psychological depths; music that embodies
visceral emotional conflicts, and stirs heated, often contradictory, passions;
the text and score shaped into radical musico-dramatic structures, employing
shockingly inventive harmonic language and orchestral timbres. »
27 Oct 2011
Exactly what makes this entertaining, handsome video of Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Renée Fleming in concert an “odyssey”? »
27 Oct 2011
Luciano Pavarotti died in September 2007, just short of his 72nd birthday and only a few years after his last performance at the Metropolitan Opera, in Tosca. »
27 Oct 2011
“Historically Informed Performance” sure has a nice ring — not only does the acronym capture the trendiness of the movement (“HIP”), but one has to admire the subtle put-down the term encapsulates. »
27 Oct 2011
How is one to write a Romantic opera? »
26 Oct 2011
According to legend, when composing Don Giovanni, Mozart completed
the overture last. It was written the night before the opera’s premiere, while his wife Constanze, a fervent taskmaster, plied him with food and drink to make sure he stayed awake. »
26 Oct 2011
Without young artists, no art form will thrive or grow. The Royal Opera House’s Jette Parker Young Artists scheme nurtures the best from its young artists that their performances attract thoughtful audiences. »
26 Oct 2011
Ossia Maestro Watching in Fog City. Ten years ago it was German provincialism, now it is the Italian sort wanting to take root in the War Memorial Opera House. »
24 Oct 2011
Wagner’s Flying Dutchman returns to the Royal Opera House, London. »
23 Oct 2011
In this appealing lunchtime recital programme, Croatian soprano Renata Pokupić demonstrated a rich, varied tonal palette and strong communicative skills as she spanned one hundred years of European song.
»
23 Oct 2011
‘Erotic oratorio’ is the odd-sounding definition devised by modern scholars, such as Howard E. Smither, for those pious music dramas employing sex-laden plots from the Bible, the Apocrypha or the lives of Saints in order to give the audience moral instruction in a quasi-operatic, if generally unstaged, form. »
12 Oct 2011
‘Requiescant in pace. Amen.’ »
12 Oct 2011
Should I wait until the end of this review to tell you how much fun, how much of a theatrical whoopee cushion Robert Wilson’s production of Die Dreigroschenoper has been at BAM last week? »
12 Oct 2011
Recorded between 24 and 27 October 2008 at the Philhamonie in Berlin, this release offers the dynamism of a concert performance with the sound quality associated with EMI’s fine recordings. »
12 Oct 2011
Some opera masterworks are admirable more than lovable — a distinction usually best revealed by the number of performances the work gets. »
12 Oct 2011
One way of thinking about La Traviata is to consider it as a portrayal of bubble wealth that makes artistic capital from the shimmering, rainbow hues of the surface rather than showing any interest in what sustains the bubble. »
12 Oct 2011
Following Lorin Maazel’s lifeless first movement from Mahler’s Tenth Symphony »
10 Oct 2011
The Los Angeles Opera Company’s charmingly understated new production
of Così fan tutte will please your eyes and delight your ears, but its story might grieve your romantic soul. »
07 Oct 2011
There are two ways to sing the role of Carmen: as a “grand opera” heroine and as a character from opéra-comique. »
05 Oct 2011
As long as one keeps in mind that historical value is not the same as aesthetic quality, this DVD of early 1960’s live German TV performances of two short Gian Carlo Menotti operas makes for fascinating viewing. »
03 Oct 2011
The haughty beauties that are the ancient colleges of Cambridge were definitely feeling the heat this past weekend, and not even the cooling streams of the Cam and its tributaries could assuage the heat of an Indian summer in the Fens of Eastern England. »
02 Oct 2011
Kudos to the Los Angeles Opera Company for expanding its heretofore limited
Russian repertoire and opening its 26th season with Tchaikovsky’s
Eugene Onegin. The romantic work based on the novel in verse of the
same name by Alexander Pushkin, is likely everyone’s favorite
Tchaikovsky opera. »
30 Sep 2011
Love and Death is the name of one of Woody Allen’s earlier films, one built around parodies of Tolstoy and other Russian 19th century literary giants. »
30 Sep 2011
My response to much of this and last year’s Mahler anniversary bonanza
has been to stay away: certainly not out of antipathy, nor out of boredom, nor on account of any other negative reaction to the music of a composer whom I admire as greatly as ever, but simply because there are too many unnecessary performances of that music on offer. »
28 Sep 2011
When the Royal Opera House London does things well, it does them very well indeed. This Gounod’s Faust was a sizzler!
»
28 Sep 2011
Bad news travels fast. Though you are about to read another version of how American diva Renée Fleming failed to bring Lucrezia Borgia alive, let us begin by discussing a few other things you already know. »
28 Sep 2011
What better way for the long-reigning director of the Vienna State Opera, Ioan Holender, to celebrate the end of his time in the post than with a lengthy gala featuring such stars as Gergely Németi, Roxana Constantinescu, Krassimira Stoyanova, and Keith Ikaia-Purdy? »
28 Sep 2011
Among recent recordings of Britten’s opera Billy Budd, the recent
release conducted by Daniel Harding has much to offer in terms of performance
quality, interpretation, and also the quality of recording. »
28 Sep 2011
In 1989, William Christie’s ten-year-old Paris-based baroque troupe, Les Arts Florissants, brought a staged production to the Brooklyn Academy of Music for the first time, Lully’s Atys. »
26 Sep 2011
Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber presented Schubert’s song cycles at the Wigmore Hall, London. »
23 Sep 2011
Frederick Delius counts among those many composers whose reputations rely on their orchestral efforts, but who dearly wanted to make a lasting contribution to the opera repertory. »
23 Sep 2011
Lawrence Zazzo’s last visit to the Wigmore Hall, in April earlier this year, saw him present an intriguing sequence of American song from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. »
22 Sep 2011
The circumstances behind Mieczysław Weinberg’s The Passenger at the ENO, London, are extraordinary. »
21 Sep 2011
In a program of Italian and French arias and duets Lyric Opera gave to
Chicago audiences a preview of the first operas in its forthcoming season and
an opportunity to hear familiar voices as well as those soon destined to grace
the operatic stages of the world. »
21 Sep 2011
Los Angeles has been good to Turandot. The gritty 1984 Andre Serban production inaugurated an opera company in Los Angeles where a mere eight years later L.A. Opera bestowed the splendid Luciano Berio ending upon the world in an uber-pompous Gian-Carlo del Monaco production. »
21 Sep 2011
Whether or not one agrees with Joseph Kerman’s immortal definition of
Tosca as a “shabby little shocker,” Puccini’s
melodramma, the inaugural production of the Washington National
Opera’s 2011-12 season, is intense, “blood-and-guts” kind of
entertainment. »
21 Sep 2011
What do a ferociously violent melodrama, an ecstatic spiritual revelation and an ironic black farce have in common? »
21 Sep 2011
It’s easy to dismiss the undoubted charms of Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love with a wry smile and a dash of condescension. »
21 Sep 2011
As one of the most successful Italian opera composers of the late-eighteenth
century, Domenico Cimarosa’s reputation lasted well into the following
century during which his operas were staple repertoire in all the major
European opera houses. »
21 Sep 2011
Stylish, spirited vocalism that rang convincingly through the Palais Garnier was the hallmark of Paris Opera’s thrilling revival of one of Mozart's least appreciated mature operas.
»
21 Sep 2011
As a rule the celebrated incomplete operas of the repertory eluded completion due to the untimely death of the composer. »
21 Sep 2011
While the music industry seems to be spiralling dementedly downmarket, the Wigmore Hall keeps standards extremely high. »
21 Sep 2011
The house lights dimmed, SFO General Director David Gockley instructed us to stand and sing the Star Spangled Banner. This crucial moment revealed the intentions and complexities of this fine production at San Francisco Opera. »
19 Sep 2011
The Wigmore Hall is the most respected centre of art song excellence in Britain and its Song Competition attracts interest from all over the world.
»
15 Sep 2011
Recorded on 31 October 2007 in the Großer Musikvereinssaal, Vienna, this performance of the Cleveland Orchestra offers a compelling interpretation of the three completed movements of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. »
15 Sep 2011
Opera companies around the world — though relatively few in the United States — cannot resist the temptation to stage Sergei Prokofiev’s first major opera. »
13 Sep 2011
Why would a French composer take an opera which epitomises German Romanticism and Nationalism and adapt it to the conventions of the French grand opera tradition? »
12 Sep 2011
Dialogues des Carmélites is a magnificently anti-operatic opera. »
10 Sep 2011
The distinguished soprano Patricia Racette once advised this observer, “If you are coming to the opera to review me, please attend the latest performance you can.” I knew what she meant. »
09 Sep 2011
When the opera opens, a chorus of Trojan is rejoicing that the Greeks have abandoned the war and gone home. »
08 Sep 2011
I shall not beat about the bush: this was a great performance. »
08 Sep 2011
Hermann Melville wrote a poem called “Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the Twelfth Century”: »
06 Sep 2011
Bochum’s Jahrhunderthalle, a massive, re-purposed industrial building, seemed an unlikely location to contain and frame the transcendent, unbounded spiritual journey of Wagner’s masterpiece Tristan und Isolde. »
06 Sep 2011
Superstitions surround theatrical productions of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy. »
01 Sep 2011
In its final performances of the Summer 2011 season the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus along with guest soloists gave two performances of Verdi’s Requiem. »
30 Aug 2011
Droughts, deserts, false gods, angels, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis and a firestorm. Plenty of drama in the Bible. In BBC Prom 58, Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort and Players made a good case for period performance of Mendelssohn’s magnificent Elijah op 70.
»
30 Aug 2011
Newsflash: Wartburg is a world-wide recycling company, at one with the universe, wherein everything and everyone exists in a perfectly sustainable environment.
»
30 Aug 2011
Film biographies of great musicians notoriously exhibit a preference for talking heads nattering on over any music passages. »
29 Aug 2011
It’s becoming rather a fashion to set operas in English public schools. »
29 Aug 2011
When discussing the evolution of opera as a genre, the towering figure of Richard Wagner cannot be ignored. »
29 Aug 2011
“The number of recordings testify to the continuing popularity of
Donizetti’s melodrama in two acts [L’elisir d’amore], which rivals Don Pasquale among his comic operas and is often rated the better on account of its superior libretto by Felice Romani.” »
28 Aug 2011
In 2008, the late Richard Hickox, founder and then music director of the City of London Sinfonia, commissioned a work from composer Colin Matthews to celebrate the orchestra’s 40th anniversary, which takes place this year. »
27 Aug 2011
As this is written, the third week of August, the Santa Fe music season is winding down. »
27 Aug 2011
Superb performance of Elgar’s epic oratorio Caractacus at the The
Three Choirs Festival in Worcester Cathedral. »
27 Aug 2011
Musical excellence was the centerpiece of three of Santa Fe Opera’s annual offerings. »
27 Aug 2011
The back cover of soprano Nino Machiadze’s debut solo recital from Sony Classical quotes her as describing the disc’s selection of arias as “my world, my successes to date and my hopes for the future.” »
27 Aug 2011
In keeping with the festival nature of the piece, the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus, along with guest soloists and a guest chorus director, gave two performances of Franz Schmidt’s Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln on recent weekend evenings. »
27 Aug 2011
The New York Festival of Song, created and run by Steven Blier and Michael Barrett, dedicates itself to what one might call “American lieder” — art songs by top American composers, classic Broadway, and operatic numbers. »
27 Aug 2011
It was a no-brainer. The Old Testament Egyptians had to become today’s Palestinians. »
25 Aug 2011
What is to be done about Armida? »
20 Aug 2011
Gaetano Donizetti is arguably the established opera composer with the highest ratio of failures to successes. »
19 Aug 2011
This concert of three substantial choral and orchestral works by Benjamin Britten recreated the ‘50th birthday’ Promenade concert which Britten himself conducted on 12 September 1963. »
19 Aug 2011
A breath of fresh air is making its way through the Glimmerglass Opera festival, and her name is Francesca Zambello. »
19 Aug 2011
The chief classical music and opera critic for the Los Angeles Times often criticizes any new operas based on familiar films or classic novels, on the basis of artistic timidity and conservatism. »
19 Aug 2011
This is where Puccini composed many of his operas until the lake got so polluted he had to move to nearby Viareggio.
»
14 Aug 2011
Today’s general public labors under the unfortunate misconception that in order to enjoy opera, one needs to be educated and at ease with mobility in social circles largely consisting of decrepit old rich people. »
14 Aug 2011
For its seventh program of the Summer 2011 season the Grant Park Music Festival presented concert ensembles performed by members of the Ryan Opera Center of Lyric Opera of Chicago. »
14 Aug 2011
For opera lovers who are serious enough to even think of a performing career, the path is an arduous one. »
14 Aug 2011
Brahms’s Violin Concerto and Mahler’s Das klagende Lied
did not seem to be the most obvious bedfellows — there has been some
rather peculiar programming at this year’s Proms — and even after
further consideration, the only real connection I could muster was that they
were written at the same time: the concerto in 1878, the cantata between 1878
and 1880. »
14 Aug 2011
It seems very appropriate that a record company called Naïve should elect to release a solo recital for a soprano in her very early 20s. »
14 Aug 2011
In the waning days of the annual summer festival, Munich’s Bavarian State Opera fielded enough star power to fire up a minor galaxy with its wholly absorbing production of I Capuleti e i Montecchi. »
13 Aug 2011
Great characters are at the center of all operatic masterpieces, yet opera almost never treads into “operatic biography” territory. »
13 Aug 2011
Gounod you know, but how about Gouvy? »
12 Aug 2011
Bonus features on opera DVDs usually get generic names, such as “Interview” or “Backstage with…” »
12 Aug 2011
A handsome black steed bows its head, eyes open, peering into the darkness around it. »
12 Aug 2011
How the saga of Italian unification in 1861 is being (half-heartedly) celebrated by opera composers. »
02 Aug 2011
From the bombastic sweeps of Richard Strauss’ Don Juan, to the
blissful rhapsodies of Walton’s Violin Concerto, and through the rhythmic
surges of Prokofiev’s choral manifesto of socialist realism, conductor Andris
Nelsons fizzed — indeed, almost exploded with energy and zest — and
inspired clarity, control and freshness from the City of Birmingham Symphony
Orchestra, on this their only visit to the Proms this season. »
01 Aug 2011
An appreciation of La traviata plus La clemenza di Tito and Le Nez/The Nose at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. »
01 Aug 2011
Alfredo Catalani’s La Wally is known for its arias, but the full opera is rarely performed. Expectations were high for this production at Opera Holland Park, London. »
31 Jul 2011
In the modern operatic world, respect for the oeuvre of any given composer, as well as his stylistic development and placement in operatic history, is sacrosanct. »
31 Jul 2011
Rodelinda is about as serious an opera as any that Handel wrote: attempted regicide and infanticide, violent death, betrayal and a marriage sorely tried. »
29 Jul 2011
It’s always a good idea to ferret away a sure-fire winner amongst the rarities, and Opera Holland Park’s Rigoletto certainly meets, and in some aspects surpasses, expectations. »
28 Jul 2011
This year’s venture for the annual Boston Midsummer Opera is an elegant reading of Rossini’s fizzy masterpiece of 1813, l’Italiana in Algeri. »
27 Jul 2011
There’s hell to pay for profligate publicity; Giuseppe Verdi and Francisco Maria Piave knew this to be true. »
26 Jul 2011
Not only did Verdi’s Requiem make its debut, rather remarkably, in the church of San Marco in Milan but the performance was as a liturgical one; Verdi’s intentions were quite firmly to provide a memorial mass for the Italian patriot, Manzoni. »
22 Jul 2011
I was feeling cowed by Herr Engels. The four of us had retired from the Stravinsky performance to a Billy Wilder-themed bar in Berlin, the least horrible late-night option in the high end mediocrity of Potsdamer Platz. »
22 Jul 2011
Buxton, like Wexford, makes a point of offering its clientele the opportunity to sample works that are unjustly neglected by the major houses, and for his final festival as director, Andrew Greenwood served up a typical feast of operatic rarities reflecting the increasingly ambitious approach which has characterised his musical stewardship. »
19 Jul 2011
The BBC Proms has given Havergal Brian’s Symphony no. 1 the best and most
extensive exposure the composer has ever enjoyed.
»
18 Jul 2011
Operatic fashions are fickle and, more to the point, often plain wrong. We all have our grievance lists of works that are ‘scandalously neglected’. »
16 Jul 2011
The First Night of the Proms seems to be edging back, if a little hesitantly, from the strange, unsatisfying ‘tasting menu’ approach adopted for a few years. »
15 Jul 2011
Luke Bedford’s first opera, Seven Angels, had its London premiere at the Linbury Studio Theatre, London.
»
13 Jul 2011
Handel’s Rinaldo at the Glyndebourne Festival is a triumph in musical terms. Don’t miss it when it appears at the BBC Proms this summer in concert performance, because some of the singing is very good indeed. »
12 Jul 2011
To commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Gustav Mahler’s death Carlos
Kalmar and the Grant Park Orchestra gave in early July two performances of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde featuring the vocal soloists Alexandra Petersamer and Christian Elsner. »
12 Jul 2011
Opera Holland Park’s unique selling point has always been a devotion to the more obscure works of Puccini and his Italian contemporaries. »
12 Jul 2011
Words, stories, books — the gateway to a world of fantasy in which anything is possible. »
12 Jul 2011
For classical music fans, summer means only one thing: summer festivals. The goal of these festivals is to showcase a wide range of repertory with thought provoking creativity. »
10 Jul 2011
The celebrated New Mexico opera festival has, in its fifty-fifth season, created a production of Charles Gounod’s 1859 masterpiece Faust, its first ever. »
07 Jul 2011
Even before a note was sounded at Opera Holland Park on Saturday evening, the still summer evening was ruffled by a breeze of unease. »
07 Jul 2011
By 1825, as Rossini’s operatic vein was approaching exhaustion, the
Neapolitan Saverio Mercadante ranked as a front-runner for his succession
alongside Bellini and Donizetti; much more so, however, in the field of serious
drama than in opera buffa. »
06 Jul 2011
I recently got the chance to see Juan, the Kaspar Holten film version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, at the Seattle International Film Festival. »
06 Jul 2011
Some of the experts said it was the best Ring ever, others merely
said it was one of the best (these were lecturers at a Wagner Society
symposium). »
30 Jun 2011
Opera Theatre of St. Louis has demonstrated yet again that it is an indispensable summer festival to be counted on for adventurous programming, thought-provoking productions, and exciting talent discoveries. »
29 Jun 2011
This Madama Butterfly at the Royal Opera House, London, brings out
the depth and intelligence of the human story Puccini might be trying to tell
us, beneath the surface gloss. »
26 Jun 2011
You would have had to be deaf and blind — or perhaps just a very wise
monkey — not to have been aware that a young American composer called
Nico Muhly was about to open at the English National Opera in London last night
with a work called Two Boys. »
26 Jun 2011
Garsington Opera — in its superb new home on the Wormsley estate in
rural Oxfordshire — has yet again confirmed the merit of its decision to
promote Vivaldi’s long-ignored operas. »
24 Jun 2011
It can be fascinating, although not necessarily pleasant, to see oneself through the eyes of others. »
23 Jun 2011
One of Richard Wagner’s most enduring contributions to music history is a concept known as gesamtkunstwerk. »
23 Jun 2011
Willy Decker’s production of Peter Grimes, first seen at
Covent Garden in 2004, should perhaps be renamed The Borough. »
21 Jun 2011
A funny thing happened on the way to Anna Bolena… »
20 Jun 2011
Need something remedial for “what ails you?” »
20 Jun 2011
The Boston Early Music Festival (hereinafter BEMF) has grown up. »
20 Jun 2011
As it turned out, it was a mild and mainly dry evening. »
16 Jun 2011
The Voltaire maxim usually given in English as “The perfect is the enemy of the good” illuminates the artistic conflicts surrounding many a Wagner production. »
15 Jun 2011
Israel Opera’s summer festival grew astonishingly in the year following its 2010 inaugural season. »
14 Jun 2011
It would seem that in his preparations for this new production of Simon
Boccanegra, the acclaimed Russian director, Dmitri Tcherniakov, has been
familiarising himself Jonathan Miller’s previous ENO efforts. »
14 Jun 2011
Think verismo and one imagines melodramatic, often violent plots which peer unflinchingly into the soul of every character. »
12 Jun 2011
The current Tosca at the Royal Opera House is something of a classic, revived four times in five years. It’s now being filmed for cinema to be released in November 2011. »
09 Jun 2011
It was a lucky happenstance that glorious vocalism characterized Badisches
Staatstheater’s La Gioconda, for effective stagecraft was nowhere in evidence…but, oh, what singing!
»
09 Jun 2011
A capacity crowd at the Wigmore Hall eagerly awaited the arrival of Andreas Scholl and Tamar Halperin on the platform on Tuesday evening. »
07 Jun 2011
‘Glitter and be gay!’ cries Cunegonde, determined to overcome the bitter circumstances in which she finds herself in sordid, downturn Paris. »
06 Jun 2011
The U.S. premiere of Hans Werner Henze’s Phaedra at the Opera Company of Philadelphia may well be the most important and ambitious new work presented by any American company this season. »
03 Jun 2011
Since 2006, movie cineplexes across the USA have attracted a somewhat unlikely crowd for Saturday matinees, from fall to spring. »
01 Jun 2011
Any performance of Brahms and Schumann four part songs is an occasion. »
31 May 2011
Pilgrimages, I suspect, derive a degree of their fruitfulness from the slowness of the journey, a pace born of desire or necessity, that removes the journey from the quotidian, brings the purpose into greater focus, and allows for a richer savoring of the experience. »
31 May 2011
Before a single track has been heard, Jordi Savall’s The Forgotten Kingdom impresses with its scale: a three-CD set packaged in a lavish, bound book that contains fifty dense pages of English commentary by nine different authors; adding the multiple translations, beautiful illustrations, and song texts, the book itself luxuriantly sprawls over 500 pages. »
30 May 2011
“Music, music for a while/ Shall all your cares beguile,” vowed Ian Bostridge at the opening of this recital with his regular accompanist, Julius Drake. »
30 May 2011
This is the one by Giorgio Strehler that opened at Versailles in 1973 and since has endured twenty-three incarnations, first at the Garnier and later at the Bastille. »
27 May 2011
It’s easy to slip into platitudes when eulogising the last London
recital performance of a singer commonly lauded as the outstanding countertenor
of his generation. »
26 May 2011
Teatro Grattacielo gives concert performances of Verismo operas that range from the obscure to the unheard-of. »
26 May 2011
Phyllida Lloyd’s reading of Verdi’s Macbeth –
first seen in 2002 and here revived for the second time – could certainly
not be described as ‘subtle’, either dramatically or visually. »
24 May 2011
Glorious sunshine for Glyndebourne Opera’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg on the eve of Richard Wagner's birthday. »
23 May 2011
André-Modeste Grétry, the greatest opera composer ever to come from Belgium, made his way to Paris in 1767 at the age of 26. »
23 May 2011
On my travels, I often hear occasional opera-goers complain about having wasted time and money on a production that, on the night, bears no relation to their expectations. »
22 May 2011
This substantial book is one of the latest in the Ashgate series of
collected essays in opera studies and draws together articles from a disparate
group of scholarly journals and collected volumes, some recent, some now
difficult to locate. »
22 May 2011
The Washington National Opera has concluded its 2010-11 season with
Gluck’s 1779 masterpiece Iphigénie en Tauride, arguably the
great Viennese composer’s greatest achievement and his swan song (if one
does not count that unfortunate flop of 1780, Echo et Narcisse —
and luckily, one hardly ever does). »
22 May 2011
James MacMillan has reunited with his librettist, the poet Michael Symmons Roberts, to produce his new opera Clemency. »
21 May 2011
By Leporello’s count (in the “Catalogue aria”), Don
Giovanni tallies over 2,000 sexual exploits. »
21 May 2011
Philipp Stölzl’s production of Benvenuto Cellini, from the 2007 Salzburg Festival, is weird almost beyond belief. »
20 May 2011
Classic films often receive the honor of a full “restoration,” especially when a new viewing format appears. »
20 May 2011
A quarter century having passed since its premiere, Nixon in China appears to have secured a niche in the opera repertoire, at least of American opera houses. »
18 May 2011
Gluck’s Orfeo is, intentionally, free of clutter. If you cut
out the scenes of balletic rejoicing just before the finale (and I can’t
think of any good reason not to do so), it’s less than ninety minutes of
music. »
18 May 2011
There’s a lot to be said for lowered expectations. After last
fall’s cramped, over-busy staging of Das Rheingold, I was
prepared for a rough night at Die Walküre—and enjoyed the
occasion very much, the staging, the direction, most of the singing, even the
costumes. »
09 May 2011
Ariadne auf Naxos, the next major endeavor of the Richard Strauss/Hugo von Hofmannsthal collaboration after Der Rosenkavalier in 1911, has been a special challenge for American opera companies. »
09 May 2011
Terry Gilliam was one of the forces behind Monty Python, the popular British TV comedy of the 1970’s. His fans will flock in droves to his version of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust at the ENO, London. »
29 Apr 2011
For the second time in a matter of just a few weeks, the Wigmore Hall
audience were treated to an evening of seventeenth-century song and dance. »
29 Apr 2011
Rigoletto is the perfect opera. Even Verdi, who wrote so many
wonderful scores, never created anything more flawless. »
29 Apr 2011
Saturday, April 23 was indeed a rainy afternoon in New York City. »
24 Apr 2011
It has long been my belief that the problems of the planet would be resolved
(or move on to their next stage) if only the folk of every ethnicity (nation,
faith, historic minority, tribe) would devote their energy to creating
opera—and perhaps theater or dance—out of its musical and mythical
traditions. »
22 Apr 2011
It’s hard to go wrong with The Magic Flute. Mozart’s
final opera contains every audience-pleasing feature in spades: beautiful
music, a fairy tale story, romance, laughter, villains, heroes/heroines, and
for most — a happy ending. »
22 Apr 2011
There’s more Byron than Brontë in Bernard Herrmann’s 1951
Wuthering Heights. »
22 Apr 2011
By the time he emerged from retirement with Otello, his
twenty-seventh opera, at 73, there wasn’t much Giuseppe Verdi
didn’t know about how to make an orchestra do his bidding, set the mood
of each line of a good story, piling excitement on excitement and letting the
tension mutate to something gentler at the right times in order to make the
outburst to follow the more demoniac. »
22 Apr 2011
To enter into David DiChiera’s space as he talks opera shop is to risk
being pulled into his world, rapt by a tractor beam emitting a constant flow of
music theater load. »
22 Apr 2011
Trust Winnipeg’s resourceful Little Opera Company to come up with a little known, yet charmingly entertaining spring production. »
19 Apr 2011
In Lyric Opera of Chicago’s new production of Handel’s
Hercules there is an undeniable interpretive strategy which prompts
the viewer to consider recurring elements of human emotion, e.g. jealousy,
rage, pity, among others. »
19 Apr 2011
They all wrote songs — lots of them: Ives, Bernstein, Rorem. In recital, however, the American product has never found a place on the perch claimed by Schubert and Schumann. »
19 Apr 2011
The most remarkable aspects of this fresh, illuminating performance of
Schubert’s Winterreise by Ian Bostridge and Mitsuko Uchida were the masterly control of dramatic form and the insightful, quite original, shaping of emotional content. »
19 Apr 2011
The very name Mantovani strikes musical terror in the hearts of high minded Americans and Brits of a certain age. Now the same surname is evidently terrorizing Parisians. »
18 Apr 2011
In Russian-speaking countries, Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride is much loved. In the west, it’s known mainly for its Overture. The Royal Opera House’s production is the first major production of the full opera in Britain. »
14 Apr 2011
In Britain, Katarina Karnéus is closely associated with Grieg and Sibelius. Indeed, her career has almost been defined by her recordings of their songs for Hyperion. »
13 Apr 2011
In those dark days before VCR and DVD, knowledgeable film buffs craved the
return of Solaris and Stalker to a local art house screen. »
13 Apr 2011
A Frenchman, three Germans and a Venezuelan-born French national: musical responses to Venice. »
08 Apr 2011
“Show goes on despite fresh bomb scare”. Not exactly the sort of
headline a new opera company might have dreamt of for its inaugural production. »
06 Apr 2011
Richard Strauss, nearly eighty years old and past caring what anybody
thought (Pauline aside), ignored the Second World War happening just down the
street and collaborated with his longtime conductor Clemens Krauss in an arch
libretto about the feud for primacy between poetry and music, concluding with
their synthesis in opera. »
04 Apr 2011
New York City Opera’s evening of “Monodramas” (under that
general title) may not appeal to the opera-goer who prefers such typical fare as the company’s other offering this week, Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore, but I found it a devilish and delightful exploration of the depths of inner consciousness. »
04 Apr 2011
Donizetti described to his father the premiere cast of L’Elisir in terms of lukewarm praise—the tenor only “passable” the soprano’s voice “pretty” and the bass “a little hammy.” »
04 Apr 2011
In this intriguing and unpredictable recital, American countertenor, Lawrence Zazzo, and his accompanist, Simon Lepper, presented a dynamic sequence of American song from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. »
04 Apr 2011
Proof that literalism isn’t truth: Jürgen Flimm’s production of Beethoven’s Fidelio, first heard at the Met and at the Royal Opera House, London in 2007. »
03 Apr 2011
Florian Boesch and Malcolm Martineau gave the finest recital so far in the Wigmore Hall’s decade by decade series of German Song. »
03 Apr 2011
Victorien Sardou wrote the melodrama La Tosca, a play subject to
all sorts of incidental drama and off-stage intrigue, for Sarah Bernhardt. »
29 Mar 2011
Benedict Andrews’ thought-provoking new production of Claudio
Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, the latest of
English National Opera’s innovative stagings at the Young Vic, juxtaposes
images of unremitting modernity with a tapestry of archaic aural colours, all
placed within an antique frame which resonates with universal emotions. »
28 Mar 2011
Rossini’s penultimate stage work, Le Comte Ory, belongs to
the tradition of sexy scoundrel operas, along with such works as Don
Giovanni, Zampa, Fra Diavolo, Barbe-Bleu,
Les Brigands and Threepenny Opera. »
27 Mar 2011
Adapting an extended literary work for the stage remains a challenge today
and was no less so in the baroque era. Ariosto’s enormously long poem
Orlando Furioso was extremely popular and inevitably his highly
coloured characters found their way onto the operatic stage. »
24 Mar 2011
Opera is alive and well in Sarasota. “It feels like it did before,” says Communications Officer for Sarasota Opera Patricia Horwell. »
23 Mar 2011
An operatic work by an esteemed composer, with a libretto adapted from a great author’s story, staged in an intelligent and well-designed production, featuring singers of the top caliber and a conductor with a deep commitment to the composer’s music, leading a chamber-sized group of his orchestra’s best players — magic in the opera house, right? »
23 Mar 2011
This is an opera written with a cannon and a feather. There is sensory
overload—an overload of sensory overload: lights that shine into your face in
the manner of an ophthalmologist scanning your retina; eerie, too-loud sounds
that invade you from every direction; dancing patterns of light that may
resolve into huge words or huge faces; a great chandelier-harp that sometimes
descends to be played, a strumming like the sounds of the sirens in Plato’s
parable of the concentric crystalline spheres. »
23 Mar 2011
With voices of doom predicting the end of the CD format — supposedly to be replaced by downloading — the ancillary art of CD packaging also faces a grim future. »
18 Mar 2011
Vincenzo Bellini’s operas are pure bel canto, with beautiful singing placed above all other considerations. »
18 Mar 2011
Is Guy Joosten’s staging of Roméo et Juliette the
best-looking production in the Met’s current repertory or what? »
16 Mar 2011
It was, of course, only a coincidence, but a week of ideal spring weather — no rain and low humidity — found Shanghai in a perfect mood for an all-Mahler program by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra on March 12. »
15 Mar 2011
Tchaikovsky’s Pikovaia Dama (The Queen of Spades) is the longest Mad Scene in opera. Ghermann is already half nuts when we meet him in the park in St. Petersburg on a windy day, and he gets crazier from scene to scene. »
15 Mar 2011
Strict courtly hierarchies and the repressed formality of ritual juxtaposed
with violent sexual jealousy and lurid erotic excess … a stage-world
more suited to the Straussian insalubrity of Salomé than to the epic
grandeur of Verdi’s Aida, perhaps? »
15 Mar 2011
It costs a lot to look cheap. And it takes a village to raise a child. In
the case of the Metropolitan Opera’s current revival of Donizetti’s
Lucia di Lammermoor, it takes a lot of talent to produce underwhelming
opera. »
12 Mar 2011
A major label release of a new studio recording of a full opera — with the traditional booklet/libretto — wanders onto the scene almost like a lost and lonely unicorn. »
10 Mar 2011
A key measure of operatic star power is the ability to get an obscure work staged — think Joan Sutherland and her run in Massenet’s Esclarmonde, an outlandish wallow in orchestral excess ladled over a libretto of unfathomable goofiness. »
10 Mar 2011
Francesco Maria Piave’s Italian libretto for Giuseppe Verdi’s
opera La Traviata is based on the French play La Dame aux
Camélias. »
10 Mar 2011
Commanding soprano performances of put-upon heroines securely anchored two recent evenings at the Bastille Opera House.
»
09 Mar 2011
Interesting recordings continue to be produced in the classical music business by smaller labels with particular niche markets. For the label Timpani, their specialty tends to be rarer French repertoire. »
09 Mar 2011
After hearing his stunning Leporello at Glyndebourne and his Figaro at Salzburg, there was no way I was going to miss Luca Pisaroni’s concert with Wolfram Rieger at the Wigmore Hall, London. But I was delighted by how wonderful he sounded close up in recital. »
06 Mar 2011
Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites is an unusual opera, but much sensitive musical thinking has gone into this production at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London. »
06 Mar 2011
Eugène Scribe and Giacomo Meyerbeer were in the business of creating
proto-cinematic spectacles of drama and music, the formula being to take a historical incident in some exotic country or era, put in a tormented love story to hold our attention, and resolve the whole in catastrophe. »
06 Mar 2011
The front leg of the grand piano may rest at a rather precarious angle, and
the out-sized martini glass lean a trifle askew, but Jonathan Miller’s
1986 production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado wears its
twenty-five years lightly — as do Stefanos Lazaridis’
eye-wateringly white, gleaming sets. »
06 Mar 2011
Relaxed, confident and composed, baritone Roderick Williams, accompanied by
pianist Helmut Deutsch, gave a polished and performance before a warmly
appreciative Wigmore Hall audience, performing an interesting selection of
songs by Wolf, Korngold, Mahler and Schumann. »
06 Mar 2011
Little is known about the extent to which Mozart and Da Ponte collaborated on the libretto for Così fan tutte. »
06 Mar 2011
Schubert, but not quite as we know him. You can always rely on the Wigmore Hall to promote adventurous recitals. »
06 Mar 2011
Ariadne on Naxos, or you could call it Bacchus á Bordeaux. It was an orgy of art. »
05 Mar 2011
Neither the music nor the libretto of Charles Gounod’s Roméo et
Juliette is quite compelling enough to have made it a popular standard. »
27 Feb 2011
Gluck’s operas are part of a continuum, a tradition of French vocal
declamation (as opposed to the Italian school of flights of elegant,
open-throated vocal fantasy) that can be traced to him from Lully and Rameau,
and then from Gluck through certain works of Mozart and Gluck’s pupil,
Salieri to the operas of Spontini, Berlioz and Wagner. »
23 Feb 2011
György Kurtág's Kafka Fragments, op 24, is a masterpiece, one of the seminal works of the late 20th century. »
22 Feb 2011
In the mid-nineteenth century, every nationality that did not possess a
national state felt a need to prove itself, to square its shoulders and claim
nationhood with all the identifying marks of a nation: a language with a
literature, a tricolor flag, a national anthem extolling the people’s
stalwart character and the country’s landscape (inevitably the loveliest
in the world), a national theater and a national opera to be performed there. »
21 Feb 2011
Der zerbrochene Krug is a very short opera by Viktor Ullmann, based on a comedy by Kleist, concerning the fall of man. »
20 Feb 2011
The first performance of Thomas Arne’s masque Alfred took
place at Clivedon House on the Thames near Maidenhead, in August 1740. »
20 Feb 2011
This production retains a special place in my heart: its first outing in
1999 was my first Parsifal in the theatre. Saving up my student
pennies, I made the journey not once but twice from Cambridge to London, was
mightily impressed the first time and a little irritated the second. »
18 Feb 2011
From the sublime (Parsifal, the night before) to the not-even-ridiculous. »
17 Feb 2011
The story is ages old, and every culture has a version of it: the mythic
princess of an underwater realm longs for the love of a mortal man. »
15 Feb 2011
Massenet tells us that his Werther is 23 years old, that Charlotte is 20 years old. Albert is 25 and Sophie is but 15. Just now the Lyon Opera assembled just such a cast. »
15 Feb 2011
At the moment, it seems inevitable that John Adams’ 1987 opera Nixon in China will become a fixture in the repertoire. »
12 Feb 2011
Romeo Castellucci is the cat’s whisker of current avant-garde theater directors. Thus it has simply been a matter of time before he would be invited to the Monnaie to stage an opera. »
11 Feb 2011
Although Paris Opéra's Dream Team of soprano Natalie Dessay and director Laurent Pelly promised much for the SRO run of Giulio Cesare in Egitto, for the moment we will have to keep dreaming of what might have been.
»
08 Feb 2011
Witty and airy as an after-dinner anecdote over biscuits and cognac, Don
Pasquale (1844) is, unlikely as it may seem, almost the last opera Donizetti
completed before his descent into the madness of tertiary syphilis. »
07 Feb 2011
In 2010, Florida Grand Opera held a gala to honor Robert Heuer on his 25th
anniversary as general director. »
07 Feb 2011
Preparing for the Met premier of Nixon in China, I resolved to
forget—or place on hold—everything I remembered, or thought I
remembered, about the real persons who are characters in this opera, »
07 Feb 2011
The original story that formed the basis for the libretto of Puccini’s
opera Turandot told of a Mongolian princess who insisted that any
prospective husband endeavor to win a wrestling match with her. »
06 Feb 2011
It’s a rare recital that can be at one and the same time intensely
intimate and extravagantly exuberant, but that’s just what Magdalena
Kozená and the eight-piece Austrian ensemble Private Musicke achieved in this
fascinating and exhilarating concert, which brought a thrill of passion,
spontaneity and excitement to the usually more restrained and rarified
atmosphere of the Wigmore Hall. »
06 Feb 2011
If you are ever lucky enough to have the opportunity to catch a great exponent of just one of two major roles — the heroines or villains — in Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, you should secure a seat maintenant. »
06 Feb 2011
If proof were needed, the Swiss capital’s heady new Le Comte Ory cements the notion that super-star Cecelia Bartoli certainly seems to have found an ideal home at Zurich Opera. »
06 Feb 2011
Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic have repeated their success with Mahler’s Das klagende Lied at the Royal Festival Hall. »
06 Feb 2011
Premiered in 2003, and aired again in 2005 and 2008, this current revival of David McVicar’s Die Zauberflöte brings many ‘old hands’ back together to re-visit oft-frequented roles on familiar ground. »
06 Feb 2011
The production of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking currently on
stage at the Houston Grand Opera is marvelously celebratory in its success. »
06 Feb 2011
Carl Marie von Weber’s magical masterpiece has had a hard time of it in France. »
04 Feb 2011
Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia at the English National Opera, London, is an interesting hybrid. The opera is performed “straight” so to speak, but encased in a frame of short filmed passages that add background and depth. These films don’t intrude, but enhance. »
03 Feb 2011
Yoav Gal, an Israeli-born composer-in-residence at the HERE arts complex in
Manhattan’s South Village, calls Mosheh a “VideOpera,” rightly giving as much place to what is seen (electronic projections) as to what is heard (from four sopranos playing the women in the prophet’s life and an orchestra of nine musicians). »
02 Feb 2011
Albéric Magnard, inspired to abandon the law for music by a visit to Bayreuth in 1886, was wealthy enough to ignore the public and go off on his own to compose. »
02 Feb 2011
It’s a joy to watch an athlete finding her legs, especially when you
know she’ll achieve her feat superbly, matchlessly, with supreme grace. I
first heard Sutherland sing I Puritani (three times) during the famous
Met run of 1976. »
02 Feb 2011
This looked an enticing programme before Vladimir Jurowski, in conversation
with the Southbank Centre’s Head of Music, Marshall Marcus, divulged its
secrets. »
02 Feb 2011
In its current production of Giacomo Puccini’s La fanciulla del West Lyric Opera of Chicago celebrates the centenary of the first performances of the opera. »
01 Feb 2011
The 2010-2011 season for Minnesota Opera is steeped in Bel Canto
opera selections, starting with Rossini’s Cenerentola this fall, currently featuring Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, and for the spring, a production of Verdi’s La Traviata with acclaimed Violetta, Elizabeth Futral. »
01 Feb 2011
A few years ago, a certain major newspaper boasted a music critic who could not bring himself either to take opera seriously or to deny himself the opportunity to review it. »
01 Feb 2011
Issued together, this set includes recordings from two different times, with Mahler’s First Symphony based on performances from 10, 11, and 23 March 2003, and the Ninth from performances between 1 and 3 June 2006. »
31 Jan 2011
Mark Adamo’s opera, based on the famous novel by Louisa May Alcott,
contains one extraordinary scene, a model of how to adapt fiction into opera. »
28 Jan 2011
A recent news report on entertainment technology noted that sales of “regular” DVDs had plummeted in recent years, while the newer Blu-Ray format has seen substantial increases. »
24 Jan 2011
Appearing on Palm Beach Opera’s website video player General Director
Daniel Biaggi points out among the reasons to attend the first show of the
company’s 2010-2011 season, “fantastic artists whose voices will
blow you away.” »
24 Jan 2011
In my July 2009 review of the first revival of Moshe Leiser’s and
Patrice Caurier’s 2005 production of Il barbiere di Siviglia I
commented that the directors, aided by conductor, Antonio Pappano, had
reinvigorated this operatic ‘old friend’, injecting freshness and
spontaneity into familiar material. »
19 Jan 2011
Based on performances give between 3 and 5 November 2005 at Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, the recent release of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony is an excellent addition to the discography of this work. »
19 Jan 2011
The Royal Opera at Covent Garden has hit on a way to revitalize a vintage production — hire a fresh cast of virtually unknown singers. »
19 Jan 2011
Arms swinging loosely at his side, a relaxed smile and bright eyes conveying
his confident ease, James Gilchrist’s young wanderer bounded nimbly onto
the stage at the Wigmore Hall, radiating and embodying the fresh
optimism of spring, at the start of this technically assured and dramatically
coherent performance of Schubert’s song cycle, Die schöne
Müllerin. »
18 Jan 2011
A recent addition to Valery Gergiev’s Mahler cycle with the London Symphony Orchestra, the SACD recording of the Third Symphony has much to recommend. »
16 Jan 2011
The dust on 65th Street is clearing up and the reviews for the renovated Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts are in — the piazza is being hailed as newly “inviting” by architects and arts critics alike, and rightly so. »
16 Jan 2011
They have been fiddling with Luc Bondy’s staging of Tosca. Scarpia doesn’t masturbate on the Madonna; he just sort of pinches her erotically. »
16 Jan 2011
Since he first came to notice a few years ago — in Messiah in this very hall, as Creonte at Covent Garden, and as Arsace in Partenope at New York City Opera, to name by a few recently acclaimed performances — many a starry accolade has been heaped upon young Welsh countertenor, Iestyn Davies: “achingly beautiful tone”,“unforgettable focus and poignancy” and “compelling sense of rhetoric” are typical of the bountiful superlatives. »
11 Jan 2011
This beautifully realized production of Verdi’s somber masterpiece of political intrigue and father/daughter reconciliation could be a complete success except for one missing element — memorable singing. »
11 Jan 2011
There is more than one way to skin a cat. »
09 Jan 2011
Long-dormant operas sometimes rise to meet a new dawn only to then slink away like the creatures of the night they were doomed to be — seductive but dangerous to approach. »
09 Jan 2011
Vincent Giroud’s valuable new French Opera, a Short History, is in hand and very welcome it is. »
07 Jan 2011
Wagner and Verdi were born within 6 months of each other. Rienzi, der letzte der Tribunen comes from 1840, and could in some ways be Wagner’s Simon Boccanegra. »
05 Jan 2011
In its production this season of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera
Lyric Opera of Chicago has staged the work in its original locale at the royal
court of Sweden. »
31 Dec 2010
Some years ago a witty soul coined the term “jumping the shark” to identify the point at which any long-running television program had exploited all its innate story/character development possibilities and had to resort to ridiculous plot contrivances and spectacle to keep the episodes — and paychecks — coming. »
31 Dec 2010
The Royal Opera at Covent Garden just made something of a splash in international opera news with a star-encrusted revival of an opera once quite popular and yet in recent years — Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur. »
31 Dec 2010
At the end of November Los Angeles Opera brought two productions to the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. »
31 Dec 2010
Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy’s impressionist drama closely
based on Maeterlinck’s eerie, symbolist play, is not a terribly vocal opera; it calls more for the subtlety of art song style than the belting of great divas and divos. »
28 Dec 2010
Once a preserve of opulent traditional productions, the summer Salzburg Festival has become a destination for viewing more cutting edge stagings. »
27 Dec 2010
New recordings of classical music don’t appear from the “big labels” very often these days, but those companies have enormous libraries from which to extract selections for compilation discs. »
19 Dec 2010
It may have been five years since Susan Bullock last performed at the Wigmore Hall, as her prominence on the world operatic stage has taken her away from the recital hall, but she wasted no time getting into her stride in this charming and musically varied concert. »
19 Dec 2010
La Fanciulla del West is Puccini’s love letter to an America that had acclaimed him joyously on his triumphant visit of 1907 to attend the Met premieres of Manon Lescaut and Madama Butterfly. »
15 Dec 2010
Badisches Staastheater’s production of Tosca starts off with a bang.
»
14 Dec 2010
No one could accuse the Paris Opera of pinching pennies (or Euro cents) in their lavishly expansive (and expensive) staging of Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler.
»
14 Dec 2010
The Royal Opera House itself is the star of this new production of Richard Wagner Tannhäuser. An intriguing twist on an opera that pits orgiastic excess against purity, pleasure against morality. »
12 Dec 2010
Johann Adolph Hasse (1699-1783) was arguably the most successful opera composer of the 18th century. Together with his favourite librettist, Pietro Metastasio, Hasse defined the genre of opera seria for an entire generation. »
11 Dec 2010
Perhaps the most unexpected occurrence of the evening was the malfunction of the Act I-Act II set change. »
11 Dec 2010
The opening night of the new season at Teatro alla Scala Milan is a gala event, the most glamorous in the entire Italian opera year. »
11 Dec 2010
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Emmanuel Schikaneder had known each other for some time before they wrote The Magic Flute. »
11 Dec 2010
Cecilia Bartoli is something of a phenomenon, capable of attracting an enthusiastic capacity crowd. »
06 Dec 2010
The Barbican’s Great Performers season often acts as a receiving house for continental opera productions, thus giving us in London a chance to hear interesting performances without actually having to travel. »
06 Dec 2010
Transplanting Britten’s Shakespeare opera to an Indian setting seems at first an illogical step by Hollywood director Baz Luhrmann. »
03 Dec 2010
With its tricky ‘orientalist’ connotations, Singspiel-originating spoken dialogue, not to mention the problem of finding five outstanding singers who can cope with the considerable demands of the solo roles (and the commercial challenge presented by the need to pay a chorus who sing barely a few bars of music), Mozart’s Die Entführung aus den Serail does not receive as many stagings as it deserves. »
03 Dec 2010
In a seamless realization with an ideal cast Lyric Opera of Chicago celebrates the magical antics and foibles of both human and fairy in its premiere production of Benjamin Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. »
03 Dec 2010
It may be as well to put matters in context by saying that Don Carlo is a
favorite opera of mine (and of all Verdi lovers), and that I found the Met’s new staging highly satisfactory, vocally very good if less than top flight, orchestrally thrilling—and that I hope to catch it again this
season. (Interesting rumors have been heard about the alternate tenor.) »
01 Dec 2010
Philip Glass has achieved a level of success that places him in a very select group of composers of serious music. »
29 Nov 2010
Not revived too frequently this 1991 production by Elijah Moshinsky updates the story to the 1960s and the films of Federico Fellini inspire the sets and costumes. »
29 Nov 2010
Neil Armfield’s insightful staging of Le nozze di Figaro is making a welcome return in the lead-up to his direction of the Ring Cycle for the Wagner bi-centenary 2013 (the first complete cycle staged in Melbourne in a century). »
23 Nov 2010
Three cheers — at the very least — for the English National Opera! »
23 Nov 2010
What some people won’t do for a standing ovation! Saturday night at the opera was a showcase of excesses. »
21 Nov 2010
Two months into the current season, after a string of so-so revivals and a curiosity which deserved to be box-office dynamite but wasn’t, the Royal Opera has finally got round to a star-studded new production. »
20 Nov 2010
Just now in San Francisco Finnish soprano Karita Mattila kicked ass as Janáček’s 337 year old Elina Makropulos.* »
19 Nov 2010
On Saturday November 13 and Sunday November 14, 2010, Arizona Opera presented Bernard Uzan’s rather different take on Bizet’s Carmen. »
19 Nov 2010
As I strolled around the corner into Piazza Verdi, my first view of Palermo’s Teatro Massimo Vittorio Emanuele stopped me dead in my tracks and damn near took my breath away.
»
18 Nov 2010
Ondine provides a nice bonus for fans of Karita Mattila in its recent DVD release of a 2006 Helsinki recital with accompanist Martin Katz. »
18 Nov 2010
Can Haiku be improved by staging? György Kurtág's Kafka-Fragmente (op. 24), is a masterpiece of zen-like purity. »
11 Nov 2010
Our modern globalized perspective makes us alert to the cultural richness of difference, much as it ironically also seems to blur distinctions with ease of access. »
10 Nov 2010
The commemorate the sesquicentennial of Mahler’s birth in 1860, EMI has released an exceptional set of its recordings in a single box. »
08 Nov 2010
A career of the highest stature earns the professional the right to do as she or he pleases, after decades of dedicated achievement. »
08 Nov 2010
There’s nothing wrong with updating an opera as long as the director,
designer and conductor share an understanding of the work’s principal ideas and motivations, conflicts and contexts, and have a clear vision of how they intend to communicate these in a new setting. »
08 Nov 2010
It’s difficult to be reasonable about Il Trovatore. Reason is the last quality we expect from any of its characters or situations. »
07 Nov 2010
Minnesota Opera’s recent production of Rossini’s La Cenerentola certainly is a fantastical, comical portrayal of the classical fairy tale. »
07 Nov 2010
Pace Tolstoy, happy marriages are not all alike, but they
require a lot of work. »
07 Nov 2010
Angelika Kirchschlager and Malcolm Martineau at the Wigmore Hall showed what real Lieder singing should be. »
03 Nov 2010
The small but perfectly formed Grosvenor Chapel in London’s exclusive Mayfair was the venue last Monday night for a programme of Handel vocal and instrumental music of considerable quality — if minimal quantity. »
03 Nov 2010
For its second production of the current season Lyric Opera of Chicago has staged a modified revival of its Carmen under the direction of Harvey Silverstein. »
02 Nov 2010
After a rather lean 2009, the 59th Wexford Festival Opera season almost felt
like a return to generous days of old. »
02 Nov 2010
Franco Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac at the San Francisco Opera has little chance of measuring up to a Cyrano standard once set here in Fog City. »
02 Nov 2010
Haydn’s L’isola disabitata is ideally suited to the modern taste for chamber opera. This is Haydn for those who think they don’t like his operas or even baroque form. »
01 Nov 2010
Clearly, there isn’t one. Yet, Carl Heinrich Graun’s 1755
rarely-performed Montezuma is of special importance in a country
celebrating 200 years of Independence from Spanish rule and 100 years since the
Revolution that ultimately toppled dictator Porfirio Díaz. »
29 Oct 2010
A great vintage Mercury album of Antal Dorati conducting Wagner overtures and preludes featured as a cover a close-up of a medieval chalice, undoubtedly meant to reference the Parsifal excerpt on the enclosed disc. »
29 Oct 2010
“Don’t I have the coolest job in the world?” said Steven Blier. »
28 Oct 2010
We all come to the opera for different things. To escape, to elevate, to laugh, to cry, or perhaps because someone else bought the tickets. »
27 Oct 2010
Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette is almost more musical than opera. Everyone knows the story, and it would be hard to compete with Shakespeare. Gounod wisely focused on music, rather than drama. »
24 Oct 2010
The last curtain call at the opera usually goes to the title character, the star of the work just performed. At the end of the Met’s new Boris Godunov, the calls begin with a solo call for the title character, René Pape as Boris, and conclude with one for the Metropolitan Opera Chorus all by themselves. »
24 Oct 2010
On 16 October 2010 in Tucson, Arizona Opera opened it’s 2010-2011
season with an operetta, The Pirates of Penzance, by W. S. Gilbert and
Arthur Sullivan. »
24 Oct 2010
It’s every opera director’s nightmare. »
24 Oct 2010
The fall opera season in San Francisco has been dealt a wild card — Jerry Springer, The Opera! Not exactly material for SF’s august opera company . . . »
24 Oct 2010
The 50th anniversary of the Metropolitan Opera at the Lincoln Center is just a few years away, so, with something less than dispatch, a DVD of the 25th anniversary Gala appears. »
24 Oct 2010
An American opera house premieres a new work by a Mexico-born composer, to his own libretto in Spanish based on a film in Italian by an English director about an unlikely friendship the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda found when in exile on a small Italian island. »
24 Oct 2010
ENO clearly expect high returns from Jonathan Miller’s La Bohème. »
24 Oct 2010
“One of the most beautiful sets I have ever seen,” crows San Francisco Opera general director David Gockley over the airwaves, “directed by Broadway legend Hal Prince.” »
24 Oct 2010
Paris Opéra’s L’Italiana in Algeri had a lot going for it, including a star mezzo in her local debut, so why was I resistant to its merits? »
24 Oct 2010
Kirsten Flagstad’s voice remains connected to the music of Richard Wagner through the recordings that continue to bring her performances to new audiences. »
21 Oct 2010
In sports they say, “Winning isn’t the most important
thing—it’s the only thing.” In the theater, getting the show
on the boards out front is the key. »
17 Oct 2010
The “popular” Handel is firmly entrenched in the collective
culture with a handful of pieces: the Christmas portion of Messiah,
the “Largo” from Serse (in fact, “Larghetto,”
but collective culture is hard to convince), and instrumental suites of the
Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks come
immediately to mind. »
16 Oct 2010
Jephtha was Handel’s last work — he went blind while
composing it, noting this on the manuscript, and though he lived another seven
years, did not deign to dictate new music. »
16 Oct 2010
Dame Joan Sutherland, ‘La Stupenda’, sang her first Gilda at Covent
Garden in 1957 under the baton of Sir Edward Downes, and sang the role many times and to great acclaim on the ROH stage. »
13 Oct 2010
A successful production of Verdi’s Macbeth relies not only on
incisive vocal characterization as projected by Macbeth and Lady Macbeth but
also on the interaction of these lead figures in order to vivify their descent
into a world of destruction. »
13 Oct 2010
With its playbill half-empty, its general director Placido Domingo
resigning, and the talk of a takeover by the Kennedy Center, Washington
National Opera is in a dire need of good news this season. »
12 Oct 2010
In the final scene of Shakespeare’s King Lear, faced with the dreadful sight of the distraught Lear cradling in his arms the body of his dead daughter Cordelia, the Earl of Kent asks: “Is this the promised end?” »
11 Oct 2010
No question that Nicola Luisotti is a conducting genius, and no question that genius runs amuck from time to time. In the case of Mo. Luisotti fairly often. »
11 Oct 2010
The opening night of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, in Rome
in 1816, was violently disrupted by vociferous protests from supporters loyal
to Paisiello, whose own comic interpretation of Beaumarchais’
politically-charged play had appeared in 1782. »
10 Oct 2010
In the popular view, the modern celebration of Christmas seems to have begun
with Charles Dickens’s revivifying A Christmas Carol (1843). »
10 Oct 2010
As good a performance of Rossini’s opera as this disc provides, for some equal entertainment value may potentially arise from the booklet essay by one Bernd-Rüdiger Kern (as translated into English by David Stevens). »
10 Oct 2010
Mahler’s well-known revisions of music he conducted include the four symphonies by Robert Schumann, and while these Retuschen have been performed from time to time, a recording of all four of them is now available from Decca. »
10 Oct 2010
Handel’s Radamisto came to the ENO at the Coliseum in glorious technicolour. »
08 Oct 2010
Haven’t you always secretly felt that singers who reach for high notes
(and make them) ought to levitate and maintain themselves in mid-air
when they do it? »
08 Oct 2010
It will be no surprise to me, a year or five from now, when someone falls to
her or his death from the guy-wires that configure so much of Robert
Lepage’s new state-of-the-art (ah! But which art?) production of Der
Ring des Nibelung. »
07 Oct 2010
Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de Perles is notoriously hard to stage. Because the plot’s so grandiose, the imagination works overtime, dwarfing the music, making it seem puny in comparison. There’s a lot to be said in favour of concert performances because they shift the balance back to Bizet. »
06 Oct 2010
Based on performances given on 18 and 21 October 2008 and 16 and 17 January 2009, this recording of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra offers its latest release of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, a work associated with the group since the composer’s lifetime. »
29 Sep 2010
Perhaps because the rather stolidly Victorian character of both its music
and its morality, Gounod’s Faust has been out of fashion in the
UK in recent decades, and owes a debt to David McVicar and his darkly Gothic
production for the Royal Opera in 2004 (now, at last, available on DVD) for the
restoration of its footing in the standard repertoire. »
28 Sep 2010
Minnesota Opera pulled out all the stops for its 2010-2011 season with its production of Gluck’s Orpheo ed Eurydice. »
27 Sep 2010
Almost irrespective of the results, it was quite a statement to open the Philharmonia’s London concert season with a performance of Nietzsche’s ‘opus metaphysicum of all true art,’ Tristan und Isolde. »
26 Sep 2010
The Royal Opera is hardly renowned for its commitment to baroque opera, and
even the great Handel still gets short shrift in his adopted city’s major
house. »
24 Sep 2010
It has been twenty-five years since San Francisco Opera has staged a Werther. so it was high time that Massenet’s whiney, weepy masterpiece be given another chance. »
23 Sep 2010
In their programme note, Christopher Alden and Peter Littlefield explain the
concept which informs this dark, dystopian production of Janáček’s
penultimate opera, The Makropulos Case — a production first seen
at ENO in 2004: »
21 Sep 2010
Opera as circus. The current San Francisco Aida comes from the English National Opera where an inspired and probably very excited administrator proposed a production by aging London fashionista Zandra Rhodes. »
20 Sep 2010
Kafka's In the Penal Colony set as an opera by Philip Glass? Against all expectations, it was a powerful and deeply moving experience. »
19 Sep 2010
Vocally impressive, Michael Tilson Thomas’s new recording of Gustav Mahler’s symphonic song cycle Das Lied von der Erde merits attention for various reasons. »
19 Sep 2010
Verdi’s 1859 hit Un ballo in maschera is an inspired choice to open an operatic season. »
16 Sep 2010
In this recital of thirty-four songs selected from Hugo Wolf’s
Spanisches Liederbuch, Ian Bostridge and Angelika Kirchschlager
revealed the profound emotional intensity of Wolf’s art; the concentrated
ardour of their performance intimated the heightened passion and expressive
angst which, as well as driving Wolf’s creative spirit, also led to
persistent depression and resulted in insanity and finally death in mental
asylum at the age of 42. »
15 Sep 2010
This show, a revival of Jonathan Miller’s 2004 production (first seen at the Maggio Musicale in Florence) is certainly a feast for the eyes. »
14 Sep 2010
At some point it became a matter of honor for elite composers to have at least one go at a full length opera. »
14 Sep 2010
It doesn’t take long for the summer’s new Lohengrin to reveal its entire bag of tricks as a large chorus of rats (yes, the chorus-as-rodents) scurries on at curtain-rise into the white science laboratory setting. »
13 Sep 2010
Everyone loves Mozart. The Royal Opera House's 2010-2011 season began with Così fan tutte, and simultaneous live international broadcast. »
12 Sep 2010
The release of Röntgen’s Faust setting on CPO makes available a recording of yet another composer’s perspective on Goethe’s famous dramatic poem. »
08 Sep 2010
Realism never comes more authentic than this RAI Rigoletto filmed live on location in Mantua, Italy and broadcast simultaneously in 148 countries.. »
07 Sep 2010
Recorded live on 13 August 2005, this recent release on the Orfeo label in its Festspiel Dokumente imprint makes available a recital given by soprano Diana Damrau and pianist Stephan Matthias Lademann during the 2005 Salzburg Festival and given at the Mozarteum. »
01 Sep 2010
The annual visit of Glyndebourne Opera to the BBC Proms has become an eagerly awaited event. »
30 Aug 2010
A world premiere of a new opera holds the promise of an exciting new addition to the fairly calcified collection of masterpieces that comprise the standard repertory. »
29 Aug 2010
Like her impressive recording of Lieder by Dvořák (Harmonia Mundi CD 901824), Bernarda Fink’s recording of a selection of Lieder by Brahms not only offers a fine representation of the music, but also demonstrate the singer’s command of this repertoire. »
29 Aug 2010
This high-concept Salome takes place in Nazi Germany.The set has two levels: on top, Herod revels with the banqueters; below, we see a dingy basement, full of kitchen workers, relaxed soldiers, and the prostitutes who help them relax. »
24 Aug 2010
When it debuted at the Met in 1991 John Corigliano’s overwrought and somewhat all-too comic Ghosts of Versailles was praised largely as a vehicle for the long-celebrated artistry of Teresa Stratas and Marilyn Horne. »
24 Aug 2010
Sibelius’s 1892 symphonic poem for soloists, chorus, and orchestra is in the tradition of the cantata-like symphonies of the nineteenth century, as found in Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang or Mahler’s Second Symphony. »
24 Aug 2010
To frame it in nearby-Cooperstown sports metaphors, the enterprising Glimmerglass Opera scored two decisive ‘home runs,’ and a decent enough ‘single’ in its 2010 Festival season.
»
24 Aug 2010
One of the leading lights of Berg’s Vienna was the architect Adolf Loos, the great crusader against ornament. »
24 Aug 2010
The greatest dramatic tenor and soprano roles have proven irresistible to Marcelo Alvarez, who started primarily as a lyric tenor, and Violeta Urmana, whose first career success came as a mezzo. »
24 Aug 2010
The fourteen year old Rossini composed his first opera Demetrio e Polibio in 1806 though it was not performed for another six years. »
18 Aug 2010
As the prelude plays, we see circles of fluorescent light moving slowly in uncertain black space. Are we seeing flights of flying saucers, as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind? »
18 Aug 2010
During a recent concert at the Grant Park Music Festival, held on this
occasion in the adjacent Harris Theater, members of the Ryan Opera Center of
Lyric Opera of Chicago presented ensembles from four operas, two each by Mozart
and by Rossini. »
18 Aug 2010
Robert Schumann’s only opera Genoveva (1850) is best known as a failure in its time and has since fallen into the list of succès d’estime, but with this new release, based on a production intended for television, conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt champions the work in his second recording of the score. »
15 Aug 2010
The performances of Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann
at Santa Fe Opera this summer are based on Michael Kaye’s edition of
the score. »
15 Aug 2010
Seattle, the city of software and Starbucks, is also a summer site for serious Wagnerites. »
15 Aug 2010
There was a time when the works of Benjamin Britten, one of the
20th-Century’s supreme composers, were not welcome at Santa Fe Opera. »
15 Aug 2010
Does this Tan Dun opera prove or disprove that for East and West, the twain shall never meet? »
15 Aug 2010
Michael Christie, now 34, was too young to see John Corigliano’s Ghosts of Versailles when it was new at the Metropolitan Opera in 1991. »
11 Aug 2010
Although productions of Gioachino Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto
are infrequent, the lively debate on successive versions of the work has
generally led to questions of priority and to informative discussions on
performance history. »
10 Aug 2010
According to Paulus Diaconus’ Historia Langobardorum, both
Lombard sovereigns warring for supremacy in late 7th-century Italy — the
legitimate king Perctarit and Grimuald the usurper — behaved rather fairly to
each other and their families. »
06 Aug 2010
The noted operatic impresario and stage director, Lotfi Mansouri, with the professional help of writer Donald Arthur, has issued his memoirs under the title Lotfi Mansouri: An Operatic Journey. »
06 Aug 2010
Period instruments and nineteenth-century grand opera are seldom found on the same stage — or even the same sentence — but as adventurous practitioners increasingly experiment in the repertoire of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, it’s a sight and sound that will inevitably become more familiar. »
02 Aug 2010
Franz Schreker, born in 1878, was a youth in the age in which psychoanalysis
first bloomed. In music, far from coincidentally, it was the post-Wagnerian era
when western tonality had been liberated from traditional rules but was
uncertain which new path to take. »
01 Aug 2010
Maria di Rohan was Donizetti’s penultimate opera, composed in
Italian for Vienna in 1843, with revisions to appeal to the taste of Paris and
Milan following. »
26 Jul 2010
Fairy Tales are often short on character, motivation and development. The stock figures are either good or bad, they are usually archetypal, and stand not only for themselves but larger dimensions of humanity. »
26 Jul 2010
George Benjamin is the leading British composer of his generation. Into the Little Hill premiered in 2006, has been acclaimed a masterpiece. »
22 Jul 2010
Despite its length and pretentions to being serious opera, Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, dating from the 1880s, remains a leaky vessel adrift on a sea of self-fulfilling prophesies of doom. »
22 Jul 2010
The operas of British composer Jonathan Dove enjoy a fairly high level of both critical and popular support in the U.K., where his best known work, Flight, premiered at the prestigious Glyndebourne Festival. »
21 Jul 2010
Bellini’s Norma was composed in 1831 and, in the era of such
singing actresses as Giuditta Pasta, Maria Malibran, Giuseppina Strepponi,
Giulia Grisi and Thérèse Tietjens (famous Normas all), soon came to be known as
the bel canto vehicle par excellence, the summit of vocal achievement. »
21 Jul 2010
Originally published in German as Herrin des Hügels, das Leben der Cosima Wagner (Siedler, 2007), this new book by Oliver Hilmes is an engaging portrait of one of the most important women in music during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. »
20 Jul 2010
Proms audiences have a tendency to be overly enthusiastic in showing their
appreciation, with an arsenal of rituals and traditions at the ready to show
their praise and adulation for their idols. »
20 Jul 2010
At the beginning of every summer, an oasis of music and theater appears like
magic in the suburbs of St. Louis. »
19 Jul 2010
The BBC Proms brought the Welsh National Opera’s hit Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg to the Royal Albert Hall and to the world, via international broadcast. »
18 Jul 2010
A performance of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony could only ever be relatively underwhelming; even a car crash of a performance would impress in some sense, indeed most likely in quite a few. »
18 Jul 2010
This was a recital of concentrated intensity — a remarkable dialogue between texts, timbres and idioms, across ages and among performers. »
18 Jul 2010
So when did you last shout “bravissima”? »
18 Jul 2010
There was a time when the likes of Luc Bondy and Francesca Zambello staged operas for the Chorégies d’Orange in its famed Théâtre Antique. »
18 Jul 2010
The annual Zürcher Festspiel banked on a heavy hitter to generate excitement for its revival of Der Rosenkavalier. »
15 Jul 2010
Poulenc’s only full-length opera is widely admired and not infrequently performed, but its claustral nature makes it tricky to stage. »
14 Jul 2010
This Glyndebourne production is, as far as I know, the first recording of any semi-opera that manages to impart a strong sense of what this peculiar, and peculiarly British, genre is like. »
13 Jul 2010
In 1881 Wagner and his wife were discussing the myth of Eros and Anteros,
and Wagner remarked, “Anteros is Parsifal.” Wagner considered
Parsifal a figure opposed to sexual love, Eros’s opposite. »
13 Jul 2010
The Aix Festival was known not so very long ago for pretentious productions. Perhaps now it will become known for good productions. »
12 Jul 2010
Something rather extraordinary happened to opera seria in 1738. The
acknowledged master of that time, London’s George Frideric Handel,
presented two new operas at the King’s Theatre: Faramondo and
Serse. »
12 Jul 2010
CENTRAL CITY — The story is banal: a single mother, an aging actress,
is alienated from her grown-up children. »
12 Jul 2010
Don Giovanni isn't new and most of the cast at Glyndebourne (led by Gerald Finley) are familiar. »
11 Jul 2010
The Parisian press was plastered with photos of Daniele de Niese. The
glamorous 31-year old Sri Lankan-Australian mega-star is everywhere these days:
a new TV series (“Diva Diaries”), a Decca greatest hits CD
(“Diva”), and, with her marriage to Guy Christie of the
Glyndebourne ruling clan, a secure position as the first lady of English opera. »
11 Jul 2010
We have Welsh National Opera to thank not only for providing the occasion for an auspicious role debut, but also for showcasing their world star in a wholly brilliant new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. »
09 Jul 2010
This was my first Verdi performance in the theatre for thirteen years or so I must have been the least jaded of critics for the opening night of the revival of Sir Richard Eyre’s La Traviata. »
08 Jul 2010
David McVicar’s production of Salome received its first revival at Covent Garden, though McVicar left its revival in the capable hands of Justin Way. »
08 Jul 2010
Garsington Opera is moving to Wormsley Park. in 2011, but it marked its last production at Garsington Manor with a glorious coda, that augurs well for the future. As a friend remarked “We'll be talking about this for years to come”. »
07 Jul 2010
CENTRAL CITY — No matter how much verismo you heap onto Madama
Butterfly, the opera — the favorite of American companies —
remains a threadbare — if tragic — tale of a love that failed. »
04 Jul 2010
The Royal Opera's intriguingly staged Manon had all the trappings of success including a soprano at the top of her game, and a tenor on the brink of his fame.
»
02 Jul 2010
Plácido Domingo isn’t a tenor, a baritone or even a singer. He’s a phenomenon. Dozens stood by the stage door at the Royal Opera House to greet him with bouquets. »
28 Jun 2010
Ring fever rages on. San Francisco has just unveiled its Walküre the completed cycle to take place next June. Gratefully the price of the SFO effort has not become a topic of conversation, as has the cost of the just completed L.A. Ring »
27 Jun 2010
What sort of production would be optimal for an opera that with more style than content? »
23 Jun 2010
Richard Wagner’s 200th birthday is just around the corner in 2013 — and the composer was, after all, born in Leipzig. »
22 Jun 2010
A bizarre rock cliff attributed in the program booklet to one Antonio Nigro was the sole background for San Francisco Opera’s production of Puccini’s version of a play named The Girl of the Golden West by San Francisco born David Belasco (1853-1931). »
22 Jun 2010
Mozart was reputedly more attached to this musical drama of hubris and honour set during the Trojan War than to any other of his stage works. »
21 Jun 2010
This recital was the last in a series of five put together by Roger Vignoles
to celebrate the lieder of Richard Strauss — a series which, comprising
85 of Strauss’ songs, has highlighted the composer’s role as heir
to the nineteenth-century German lieder masters and reminded us of the
ravishing beauty and varied emotional range of these unjustly neglected
songs. »
21 Jun 2010
With Opera Theatre of St. Louis’ stunning A Little Night
Music, at long last we have been treated to a multi-faceted production
that not only equals, but in many ways surpasses the dazzling original. »
21 Jun 2010
$32,000,000, and it would have been a bargain at $50,000,000. Los Angeles Opera went for broke, and it paid off with a Ring that has raised the worldwide Ring bar to a dizzying height. »
19 Jun 2010
Early Greek writings say that Orpheus was the son of the muse Calliope and either Apollo, the god of prophecy and music or Oeagrus, the river god. »
18 Jun 2010
Paris Opéra recently served up two past productions in vibrant performances that were fresh-as-new. »
18 Jun 2010
Recorded in May and June 2008, this new Unitel Classica Blu-Ray disc of Götterdämmerung is the final opera in the staging of Richard Wagner’s Ring der Nibelungen staged at the Palau de les Arts “Reina Sofia”, Valencia, by La Fura dels Baus, Valencia, conducted by Zubin Mehta, and directed by Carlus Padrissa. »
18 Jun 2010
A Franco Zeffirelli production for The Metropolitan Opera typically prompts the use of adjectives such as “grandiose,” or “gorgeous” on the positive end or “gaudy” and “gratuitous” on the negative. »
10 Jun 2010
Garsington has become a distinctive part of the English summer opera season. »
09 Jun 2010
György Ligeti (1923-2006) was a naughty boy, and he reveled in it. »
09 Jun 2010
The opening tableau of Penny Woolcock’s new production depicts deep waters with rays of sun hitting the surface; in the murky blue depths, three harnessed acrobats glide down to the sea bed and back up again. »
09 Jun 2010
Siegfried is a challenging opera to stage effectively, and the presentation by La Fura dels Baus in Zubin Mehta’s new Ring cycle merits attention on various counts. »
08 Jun 2010
It was more the ruins than the remnants of a once-great voice that Jessye Norman brought to Israel’s new, 6500-seat outdoor opera theater at the foot of historic Masada Mountain. »
08 Jun 2010
Israel Opera Nabucco includes three Va pensiero’s It’s apocrypha, of course, but legend has it that since its 1843 premiere at La Scala audiences have wanted an encore of the chorus Va pensiero when Verdi’s Nabucco is on stage. »
08 Jun 2010
Faust has long since left the French repertory to enter the international repertory, meaning that, like Disneyland, it has been absorbed into diverse cultures where it discovers new resonances. »
08 Jun 2010
Detailed and precise, but never fussy, David McVicar’s thought-provoking production of Le Nozze di Figaro is ‘busy’ from the opening rushing semi-quavers of the overture. »
07 Jun 2010
Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, son of an Italian mother and a German father, was born
in Venice but acclaimed only when he took his operas to Germany, where he
became quite popular during the first decades of the twentieth century. »
07 Jun 2010
Opera Australia regularly commission new work. Usually serious subjects
drawn from notable Australian literature or dealing with an event or hero from
Australian history. »
07 Jun 2010
During its recently concluded season Lyric Opera of Chicago presented two
musical pieces based on the theme of “Faust.” »
07 Jun 2010
Everyone knows the tunes from Bizet's Carmen even if they don't know it's an opera. Now the Royal Opera House, London, is making the world's best known opera into the world's first 3D opera film. »
07 Jun 2010
In Europe only a few theater stage directors are operatically more famous than Peter Stein (pronounced Pay-tear), to mention Sir Peter Hall, Patrice Chereau and Giorgio Strehler as examples. »
07 Jun 2010
Seeing Tosca at the Coliseum brings back happy memories, as it was a
performance of Tosca (in a revival of the Keith Warner production in the 1990s) which occasioned my very first trip to the ENO. That also happens to have been
the first time I ever saw Tosca. »
06 Jun 2010
Bringing their recent recording of Schubert’s late songs to the concert stage, Ian Bostridge and Antonio Pappano swept through a sequence which ranged from bitter-sweet regret to angry self-reproach, from hesitant hope to turbulent despair, in this the second of two performances at the Wigmore Hall. »
05 Jun 2010
Alban Berg died in 1935, but his music was generations ahead of his time
– as one could not help but conclude during the recent revival of
Lulu at the Met whenever the vibraphone played “doorbell”
music, reminding us of the intrusion of cell phones into theaters. »
01 Jun 2010
One very tall and gaunt,one short and stocky, one introspective, one effusive : Ian Bostridge and Antonio Pappano, Music Director of the Royal Opera house make an odd couple, but they've partnered each other musically for many years. It's a good relationship, as this recital at the Wigmore Hall demonstrated. »
27 May 2010
The second of Zubin Mehta’s new Ring cycle on DVD, the staging of Die Walküre by La Fura dels Baus, is as engaging as the production of Das Rheingold in its innovative presentation and effective performance of one of Wagner’s most popular operas. »
22 May 2010
Star born through stutter? It’s immediately obvious that Jacques Imbrailo’s
Billy Budd at Glyndebourne is an extraordinary portrayal. His stammer is more expressive than speech. »
20 May 2010
Listeners who have appreciated Gerald Finley’s stylish and moving
singing of baritone roles in operas by Mozart and other composers will be
pleased with the recent CD release of Great Operatic Arias in English. »
20 May 2010
Expectations were running high for the opening night of Elaine Kidd’s
revival of Laurent Pelly’s production of Donizetti’s mad-cap romp,
La Fille du regiment — almost as high as Tonio’s infamous
top Cs. »
19 May 2010
At the Wigmore Hall, performers can chose daring repertoire, because audiences there are unusually receptive. »
18 May 2010
Some fortunate operas have any number of fine live versions available on DVD. »
17 May 2010
Recorded live at the Palau de les Arts “Reina Sofia”,
Valencia, this new video of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold
is based on the staging of La Fura dels Baus, with Carlus Padrissa, stage
director, and featuring an international cast conducted by Zubin Mehta. »
17 May 2010
Back in 1989 Ken Russell opened his Genovese Mefistofele with heavenly choirs contemplating the divinity of a praying mantis. »
17 May 2010
“If you could take any one memory with you to eternity, which one would you choose?” In Michel van der Aa’s After Life several people meet in a waiting room. »
15 May 2010
Tristan has been a fairly frequent visitor in Genoa over the past sixty years (post WW II). Tullio Serafin conducted the Isolde of Maria Callas there in 1948. »
12 May 2010
Richard Eyre’s production of La traviata is so beautiful that it can be watched repeatedly, yet still yield pleasure. But appearances, however splendid, aren’t quite enough to make a completely satisfying evening. »
10 May 2010
It’s glorious and it’s gripping; it’s grand — and
it’s good! Indeed, Jake Heggie’s Moby Dick,
premiered by Dallas Opera in its handsome new Winspear Opera House on April 30,
is a work that restores meaning to basic vocabulary made banal by overuse
through the decades. »
10 May 2010
London’s Wigmore Hall is one of the world’s great centres for art song. This recital, by Susan Bickley and Iain Burnside, specialists in the genre, showed that English language art song is alive and thriving. »
02 May 2010
Armida is fabulous. That is to say, the story is a fable. Rinaldo,
the very type of Christian warrior, is torn between his duty to lead the First
Crusade and the sensual ecstasies offered by the beautiful sorceress Armida. »
02 May 2010
It’s time Verdi got attention in Aida, not elephants. »
28 Apr 2010
Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face is back at the Linbury Studio Theatre at the Royal Opera House. It's a classic. Once again, Joan Rodgers sings the Duchess, supported by Alan Ewing, Iain Paton and the incomparable Rebecca Bottone, all in multiple roles. »
27 Apr 2010
Fifty-five years after its premiere, composer and creator reunite for a new
production at Boston University »
27 Apr 2010
The story of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia (The
Barber of Seville) is based on Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’
1775 play, Le barbier de Séville. »
27 Apr 2010
It started with a bang and ended with a whimper. Juilliard’s
production of Francis Poulenc’s opera Dialogues des Carmélites
opened on Wednesday, April 21 and the performance started out strong. »
26 Apr 2010
Pick the word: soupçon? snippet? tidbit? quark? to describe the infinitesimal bite of Wagner bestowed upon us by the Met this year — and we had to wait till the end of April, to boot! »
26 Apr 2010
Chaos and disorder rule at Los Angeles Opera of late, and not just in the fervid imagination of director Achim Freyer, the artistic force behind the controversial staging of Richard Wagner’s four-evening glorification of chaos and disorder. »
24 Apr 2010
The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland
— College Park is presenting Shadowboxer, an opera based on the
life of Joe Louis, with music composed by Frank Proto to a libretto by John
Chenault. »
24 Apr 2010
From the Maryland Opera Studio comes a riveting new opera that transforms
the life of American boxing legend Joe Louis (“The Brown Bomber”)
into an epic tale of human struggle, triumph, and failure. »
24 Apr 2010
This month, the Maryland Opera Studio (MOS) at the University of Maryland,
College Park, marked its spot in opera history with the world premiere of
Shadowboxer, a jazz-infused opera based on the life of iconic American
boxer Joe Louis. »
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). »
11 Feb 2010
Gluck’s Armide, as semi-staged (costumed dancers but no
scenery) at the Rose Theater by the Washington-based Opera Lafayette, was
exactly what Gluck designed the piece to be: a supremely elegant entertainment. »
10 Feb 2010
Michael Hampe seems to have been the director of choice in the 1980s for tastefully traditional Rossini productions. »
07 Feb 2010
Donizetti’s original concept of Lucia di Lammermoor is revealed in its true glory in this ground breaking production by the English National Opera, first heard in 2008. The opera is loved in its familiar form, but the new critical edition reveals the depth of Donizetti’s musical creation. »
07 Feb 2010
If you want Italian opera go to Italy and hope for the best — like conductor Daniel Oren’s Manon Lescaut two years ago in Genoa. »
04 Feb 2010
For those who might be seeking a representational tale of the legendary Roman slave Spartacus, well, Gladiator this ain’t. »
02 Feb 2010
First seen in 1995, and here receiving its seventh revival, Jonathan Miller’s Così fan tutte has lost none of its power to unsettle and discomfort. »
02 Feb 2010
Parsifal had its first performances in Bayreuth in 1882 where it was soon seen by Wagner’s soul mate Friedrich Nietzsche. And there the friendship ended. »
02 Feb 2010
Gil Shohat, now 35 and Israeli’s top classical composer, was 15 when
in the ‘80s he saw Hanoch Levin’s The Child Dream on stage in his native Tel Aviv. Shohat, of course, knew Levin’s work well, for throughout early decades in the history of Israel he — its outstanding dramatist — had served somewhat as the conscience of a nation tormented defining itself within its pain-wrought beginnings. »
01 Feb 2010
The Wigmore Hall was bursting its seams in excited anticipation of this recital by the American mezzo-soprano, Joyce DiDonato. »
29 Jan 2010
Melodic and scenic gaiety predominates in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s new
production of Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow. »
28 Jan 2010
The Times used to have a music critic who seemed to feel that singing,
especially in costume, didn’t count as serious music, though he reviewed
opera anyway. »
25 Jan 2010
Covent Garden has revived director Robert Lepage’s popular and well-traveled version of The Rake’s Progress with often thrilling results. »
25 Jan 2010
We all wish Henry Purcell had written a few more operas like Dido and
Aeneas — simple to cast, simple to stage, offering endless
possibilities for either reserved or outrageous treatment, attractive to every
sort of audience. »
22 Jan 2010
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, around 1777, the Empress Maria
Theresa used to visit Prince Esterhazy’s summer palace at Esterhàza,
where there was an opera house fully equipped with stage machinery, leading
singers, an orchestra, and a guy named Joseph Haydn to compose on cue. »
22 Jan 2010
While Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) is best known to modern audiences for his colorful programmatic works associated with Italian locations, his vocal music is also engaging. »
19 Jan 2010
Robert Stuart Thomson’s Italian language learning text, Operatic Italian, promises to become an invaluable textbook for aspiring operatic singers, voice teachers, coaches and conductors. »
18 Jan 2010
Stiffelio was composed just after Luisa Miller — an opera that has had little trouble holding its own in the repertory — and just before the magic trio of Rigoletto, Trovatore and Traviata, the first Verdi operas to take their immediate place on the stages of the world and hold them without a break from that day to this. »
18 Jan 2010
Most musical of mourners, weep anew!
Not all to that bright station dared to climb
And happier they their happiness who knew
Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time »
18 Jan 2010
Concert performances of operas are often problematic in that the work tends to be cut or otherwise played around with, or the venue is inappropriate - after all, these were meant to be staged pieces. »
17 Jan 2010
Elina Garanča conceals her gleaming gold tresses beneath a curly black wig to sing Carmen. »
17 Jan 2010
The Opéra National de Montpellier sometimes rises to artistic heights, and even when it fails its attempts are often interesting. »
14 Jan 2010
Are you sitting comfortably? »
08 Jan 2010
Well into the 1960s, ‘provincial theaters’ were the backbone of Italy’s operatic culture. »
07 Jan 2010
Rare repertory but not truly rare, Massenet’s Cendrillon makes an appearance from time to time. »
29 Dec 2009
David Agler must be feeling a trifle unlucky. Having in 2005 taken over the reins of a flourishing, internationally renowned opera festival, with a stylish new opera house in the planning and the Irish economy booming, his hopes must been high; but in the event the Canadian’s first few years as Artistic Director of the Wexford Festival Opera have been far from plain-sailing. »
18 Dec 2009
The roles Richard Strauss composed for his “chorus” of Five Serving Maids in Elektra — all that remains in the opera of the commentator chorus in Sophocles’ tragedy — are short but arduous. »
18 Dec 2009
Productions of Giuseppe Verdi’s early opera Ernani have become relatively infrequent primarily because of the difficulties of casting the work requiring four demanding roles. »
18 Dec 2009
Exchanging the stage of The Royal Opera House — where he is currently
performing the role of His Highness in Tchaikovsky’s fairy-tale opera,
The Tsarina's Slippers — »
18 Dec 2009
Encountering Frankfurt Opera’s staging of Leoni’s L’Oracolo and Puccini’s Le Villi, I was reminded of that old saw about the German weather. »
18 Dec 2009
It is hard to know where to start to adequately laud Netherlands Opera’s witty new La Fanciulla del West. »
18 Dec 2009
The one thing certain about the judgment of history is that history will change its mind. »
15 Dec 2009
Il Corsaro, the Verdi rarity currently on display at Zürich Opera, is the best of both possible worlds. »
11 Dec 2009
This disc faces a marketplace already crowded with similar compilations from major companies who can raid their archives to offer competitive interpretations at bargain prices. »
11 Dec 2009
Emma Matthews is an English born soprano currently resident in Australia where she has sung with the state based opera companies as well as the national company Opera Australia where she is currently a soloist. »
11 Dec 2009
The Tales of Hoffmann is a cruel piece, for all the wit of the macabre tales on which it is based and the sparkle the dying Offenbach put into his last and grandest score. »
11 Dec 2009
Musically, Australia looks to Britain and Europe, especially for its operatic diet and America’s considerable operatic output has been overlooked. »
10 Dec 2009
In dark, damp December we need good cheer, and Der Rosenkavalier at the Royal Opera House, delivers colour and spectacle. in abundance. It's a revival of the John Schlesinger production from 1884, and somewhat antiquated, but that's no disadvantage, for the passage of time haunts Der Rosenkavalier. »
08 Dec 2009
Spearheaded by a stunning design concept for The Tsarina’s Slippers, London’s Covent Garden served up as delectable a production as could be desired, and introduced its lucky patrons to a jewel of an under-performed comic opera in the bargain. »
06 Dec 2009
For its second production of the 2009-10 season Lyric Opera of Chicago staged a revival of Charles Gounod’s Faust, last seen here in 2003-04. »
04 Dec 2009
The best news about the Met’s eleven-year-old Jonathan Miller
production of Le Nozze di Figaro is that it has been restaged by
Gregory Keller, more tautly spun, many elegant jokes or character moments
inserted, several idiocies discarded and with plenty of room remaining for
singers with a flair for it (such as Luca Pisaroni and Isabel Leonard) to
invent comic business of their own. »
02 Dec 2009
Sir Peter Hall created this production of Otello at Chicago Lyric Opera in 2001. »
01 Dec 2009
ENO did not exactly ‘import a choir of Heathens’ to encourage the Shaws of this world to ‘hasten’ to its version of ‘Messiah’ ‘if only to witness the delight of the public and the discomfiture of the critics,’ the contribution of ‘Heathens’ in musical terms being limited to representing the populace of an initially grey Britain (or so I assume) but for every critic who was discomfited — most of us — there were hundreds of audience members who loved it, so it’s fairly safe to predict a considerable hit. »
30 Nov 2009
Mark Padmore and The English Concert took us on a journey from the dark depths of melancholy to the ethereal transcendence of joy, in a display of consummate artistry at the Wigmore Hall. »
27 Nov 2009
The question that puzzled me when attending Esther was Why. »
24 Nov 2009
Ralph Locke’s recent book on Musical Exoticism is both an historical survey of aspects of the exotic in Western musical culture and a discussion of paradigms of the exotic and their relevance for musicological understanding. »
24 Nov 2009
Like most opera companies, the Mozart/da Ponte trifecta of Figaro,
Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte are central to Opera
Australia’s repertoire. »
24 Nov 2009
There was a certain inevitability about the build-up to Iestyn Davies’ recital at the Wigmore Hall in London last Wednesday. »
17 Nov 2009
In the mid-1980s (just before the Riccardo Muti era began), Lorin Maazel often ruled the conductor's roost at La Scala. »
17 Nov 2009
Leoš Janáček’s From the House of the Dead is a
very odd duck to find on the stage of a grand opera house. »
15 Nov 2009
London has long been spoiled in the operatic rarity department, thanks to companies like Opera Rara, Chelsea Opera Group and University College Opera populating various areas of the Venn diagram that is obscure repertoire. »
12 Nov 2009
Hindemith’s Das Marienleben has a formidable reputation, but is rarely heard. Soile Isokoski could change all that. This cycle is a tour de force, but tours de force need singers capable of achieving them. »
11 Nov 2009
The worlds of lieder and opera seem to share the same galaxy, while being countless light years apart. »
11 Nov 2009
Wagner was last on stage in Houston’s Wortham Theater Center in 2001, when the Houston Grand Opera staged Tannhäuser. »
11 Nov 2009
The December opening of the La Scala season requires a notable production, and in 2001 a gorgeous new production of Verdi's Otello fit the bill. »
10 Nov 2009
This grueling production of Bartok’s operatic masterpiece, Duke
Bluebeard’s Castle, clearly did not set out to retain any of the
ambiguity and mystery of the fairytale which inspired it. »
09 Nov 2009
If Herbert von Karajan conducted Madama Butterfly and Maria Callas sang Isolde it follows that Nicola Luisotti should conduct Salome. »
09 Nov 2009
As an interpreter of Benjamin Britten, Philip Langridge has long been
esteemed as the natural successor to Peter Pears; »
04 Nov 2009
Unlike many contemporary composers — who too often derive their operas from full-length novels — William Bolcom (whose first opera, to be fair, was the novel-based McTeague, which I do not know) based his second, »
04 Nov 2009
Rio de Janeiro, which has had a string of winning luck in recent days — not only will it host the 2014 World Cup of soccer, but also the 2016 Olympic Games — continues a laudable and venerable tradition in the arts — the Biannual Festival of Contemporary Brazilian Music, now in its 18th edition. »
03 Nov 2009
In celebration of their 25th birthday and the 250th anniversary of the death of Handel, English Touring Opera has devised Handelfest, an extravaganza of five operas (Flavio, Teseo, Tolomeo, Alcina and Ariodante) and a wide variety of masterclasses and workshops taking in several of the company’s usual touring venues. »
03 Nov 2009
Thomas Arne's masterpiece, Artaxerxes, was a huge hit after its 1762 debut. Yet the work is now a rarity. This spectacular performance at the Linbury Studio Theatre, will certainly raise its public profile. »
03 Nov 2009
The Paris Opera season started with ‘un boum,’ scoring decisive successes with two infrequently performed stage pieces. »
30 Oct 2009
At the time of the premiere of Tancredi in 1813, Rossini, not quite
twenty-one years old, had been composing works for the stage for three years
and was still not world famous. »
30 Oct 2009
For Italy’s opera community, October is Verdi’s month. The composer was born near Busseto (now part of Parma Province) on October 10, 1813. »
29 Oct 2009
Ned Rorem's Evidence of Things Not Seen received its European premiere at the Oxford Lieder Festival. »
26 Oct 2009
Shadows and reflections flicker and dart alarmingly across Tanya McCallin’s dark, gloomy sets for David McVicar’s The Turn of the Screw, first seen in 2007, in a disturbing production that chillingly conveys both infinite mystery and claustrophobic terror. »
26 Oct 2009
Greed, lust and folly … Richard Jones’ comic double bill, first seen in 2007 and faithfully revived here by Elaine Kidd, certainly sharpens the spotlight on those eternal human foibles. »
26 Oct 2009
The Met’s production of Der Rosenkavalier still arouses gasps
from audience members as the curtain rises on each set — and laughter at
appropriate moments — and tears at others. »
26 Oct 2009
Pascal Dusapin (b. 1955) is an engaging composer, and his recent works includes a chamber opera entitled Faustus, the Last Night, a unique setting of the legend and a fine contribution to modern opera. »
25 Oct 2009
Dr. Charles Burney, who in August 1770 heard Galuppi’s singing girls
at the Incurabili, one of Venice’s four competing Ospedali or
musical orphanages, admired both their excellent performing standard
(“indeed all were such as would have merited and received great applause
in the first operas of Europe”), and the quality of the music that the
aging maestro was still able to write for them: “ it is generally allowed
here that his last operas, and his last compositions for the church, abound
with more spirit, taste, and fancy, than those of any other period of his
life”. »
25 Oct 2009
There is a buzz of excitement in the War Memorial Opera House on Friday nights that is akin to the Saturday afternoon buzz at the Met. »
25 Oct 2009
Ruxandra Donose sings Concepción in Ravel's L'heure Espagnoie in a double bill with Gianni Schicchi at the Royal Opera House. Concepción is an unusual personality, so Miss Donose's characterization is interesting. »
25 Oct 2009
Saturday October 17th found the Los Angeles Dodgers out of town for the weekend, but traffic still clogged the freeways leading to their stadium. »
20 Oct 2009
ETO’s production of Tolomeo for one night only at the Britten Theatre, capitalizes brilliantly on the necessary simplicity of this chamber-like opera, written at a time when Handel could no longer call upon fabulous sets and stunning effects, relying only upon great singing - and what singers he wrote it for, in fact the grand trio of Senesino, Cuzzoni and Bordoni. »
19 Oct 2009
For the first production of its 55th season Lyric Opera of Chicago has staged a revival of Puccini’s Tosca with a cast of notable singers led by music director Sir Andrew Davis. »
16 Oct 2009
Vincent d’Indy lived eighty years and, when not composing, spent his time revising the teaching of music in France or simply annoying everybody. »
15 Oct 2009
Noblesse oblige: The Met feels it must present Aida — and
Tosca — and La Bohème — and certain other gaudy spectacles — because it’s the Met and everyone expects the grandest of the grand. »
13 Oct 2009
Some of the more memorable achievements of San Francisco Opera occurred in the brief life-span of its Spring Opera season, 1961-1981. »
13 Oct 2009
A writer goes to dine in an urban Chinese restaurant, where his eye is caught by a distressed young woman among the crowd of diners. »
13 Oct 2009
The Wigmore Hall never stands still: not content with having increased its audience by 300% over the past year, it now seeks both to reward its loyal patrons for their support in acquiring the Lease, and to bring in new audience members, with an innovative series of ten concerts where all the seats are priced at £10. »
13 Oct 2009
Bartlett Sher’s production of Il Barbiere di Siviglia has
proved one of the more admired stagings of the Peter Gelb regime, but
I’ve avoided it due to a surfeit of Barbieres and to fond
memories of the John Cox production on Robin Wagner’s delicious turntable
set, about as ideal a Barbiere as could be imagined. »
11 Oct 2009
In the opera house, stagings can impress by gorgeous sets and costumes. But in semi-staged performances, there's no where to hide behind. Semi-staging tests whether a director understands the music and what its dramatic soul might be. In dramaturgy, less is more. »
11 Oct 2009
The full five-act version of Verdi’s historical epic, Don Carlo, makes for a long evening, but thanks to some fine singing and to the driving sweep of the baton of Semyon Bychkov this four-and-a-half hour performance raced by. »
11 Oct 2009
There is something quote refreshing about the fact that a staging as characterful as Jonathan Miller's 27-year-old “New York Mafia” Rigoletto is the nearest thing to a warhorse that ENO has in its repertoire. »
11 Oct 2009
In the otherwise silent sixteen years between La fanciulla del west (1910) and Turandot (1926) Puccini had a flirtation with operetta, La rondine (1917) and with the quick and easy drama of the short story in his three one-acts, Il trittico (1918), composed as a one-evening cycle. »
11 Oct 2009
A note on the inside back cover of the booklets for these two releases announces that they are part of a new Supraphon series dedicated to “archive recordings of complete operas not yet available on CD.” »
11 Oct 2009
A number of performances from the Sferisterio Opera Festival have been released in recent months. »
11 Oct 2009
Robert Wilson staged Salome at La Scala in 1987, installing a troop of student actors on the stage to enact some sort of abstract action flow that had no discernible relationship to the Salome libretto, meanwhile sung by concert dressed opera stars huddled on a corner of the stage. »
11 Oct 2009
Videos from the Bayreuth Festspiele typically feature the highest quality audio and video of any live performance documents. »
11 Oct 2009
The back cover description of this Medici Arts DVD can fairly be called misleading, though not dishonest. »
11 Oct 2009
Although this DVD comes on the Naxos label, an earlier CD version of the same performance went under the Dynamic label, specialists in rare repertory. »
11 Oct 2009
It’s three down and one to go in the first-ever staging of Richard
Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen at Los Angeles Opera. Following the
premiere of Siegfried, the third installment of this epic work of
music theater, it’s clear that director/designer Achim Freyer is a
hands-down winner. »
11 Oct 2009
Dear non-German speaking Opera Today reader — what's your first guess as to the meaning of the biggest word in the title of this obscure Johann Strauss operetta? »
11 Oct 2009
Will the 22nd century still see the opera-loving world as fascinated by the ongoing saga of the Wagner family as the 20th did and the 21st does? »
09 Oct 2009
In the end the performance does not rescue the dreary new production — still, the reason to visit the Met’s new Tosca is Karita Mattila’s bravura if wrongheaded interpretation of the title role. »
06 Oct 2009
This wasn't an ordinary concert but something very special. The Wigmore Hall was honouring Imogen Cooper on her 60th birthday. She is greatly loved here, both as soloist and as partner in song recitals. The atmosphere was electric. The house was packed, with many famous pianists and singers in the audience. It was a historic occasion, but it felt like a party among friends. »
04 Oct 2009
SFO general director David Gockley has a mania for developing new audiences — last year The Bonesetter’s Daughter was aimed at enticing the Asian American community into the opera house, and Porgy and Bess encouraged the African American community to cross the threshold. »
04 Oct 2009
The only thing truly operatic in this work is the use of the word “opera” in the title. »
04 Oct 2009
Besotted admirers of certain lesser-known operas of debatable merit sometimes include conductors, singers and opera house managers with the power to get their cherished rarity on stage. »
03 Oct 2009
Over 100 years ago, Adolphe Appia sketched designs for Tristan und Isolde that have influenced theatre design from Alfred Roller to Wieland Wagner. Appia's vision came to life on stage at the Royal Opera House this week. This new production has far deeper roots in tradition than its detractors realize.
»
30 Sep 2009
The complexity of staging Puccini's evening of three one-act operas, Il Trittico, has kept this masterpiece from appearing on opera stages as frequently as, say, Turandot or Tosca. »
24 Sep 2009
This programme of mostly solemn, elevated music based around songs on such themes as Evening, Death and Immutability was part of Matthias Goerne’s ‘Journey with Schubert’ during which he is recording the songs on eleven CDs and presenting the series in recitals all over the world. If the singing on this occasion is anything to go by, these recordings are set to become the standard to which other singers should aspire. »
20 Sep 2009
When Matthias Goerne sings, it’s never superficial. Lieder is a genre that needs almost as much engagement from listeners as from performers. “It's like a church in there”, someone said to me about the Wigmore Hall. “They’re really listening”. »
20 Sep 2009
Schubert’s first song-cycle is a perfect choice with which to open a
new concert season, and the Wigmore Hall was packed on Friday evening in
anticipation of this recital by tenor Mark Padmore, much admired for the focus
and concentration of his ‘story-telling’, and Paul Lewis, one of
the most expressive and poetic of pianists today. »
20 Sep 2009
Bampton Classical Opera have two areas of specialism: little-known gems of the late eighteenth-century and ‘opera in adversity’. »
20 Sep 2009
While the cover of this Decca two-DVD set mirrors that of Cecilia Bartoli's 2007 CD, Maria, the contents are not identical. »
20 Sep 2009
A massive female figure fills the whole stage at the ENO for Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre, in this amazing production from La Fura del Bas. (Alex Ollé). This production is so inherently dramatic that it brings Ligeti's "anti-opera" onto a new level as theatre.art. . »
20 Sep 2009
Reading the articles in the booklet for this set, it becomes clear that librettist Colin Graham was the driving force behind this opera's creation. »
15 Sep 2009
Chamber opera is coming back after a period when it appeared to be confined to experimental works. »
15 Sep 2009
The legacy of the late conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli includes a number of fine recordings of Mahler’s music, and among them is his Deutsche Grammophon recording of the composer’s Fourth Symphony with the Philharmonia Orchestra and the soprano Edita Gruberova. »
15 Sep 2009
‘It’s a personal choice’ / ‘Of course he won - he was the only one who sang songs’ / ‘I’ll be happy if anyone but the first one wins’ (he won) / ‘There’s only one possible choice - the third one’ (he came second) »
15 Sep 2009
If, dear reader, a desire has ever swept over you (a desire such as a pregnant woman's craving for vanilla ice cream with pickles) to hear music reminiscent of both Messiah and the Fingal's Cave overture, CPO is just the musical ice cream parlor/deli for you. »
10 Sep 2009
The true opera fan devotes almost as much time, if not more, to the "what might have been" careers as to those of the superstars. »
10 Sep 2009
Archival radio recordings of complete operas seldom have ideal sound, but the audio is usually sharper than that of a live performance while still carrying a comparable dramatic immediacy. »
09 Sep 2009
Among the important recent cycles of Mahler’s symphonies is the one underway by Valery Gergiev with the London Symphony Orchestra. »
09 Sep 2009
Beethoven’s Fidelio is actually several works combined — a rescue opera in the grand style of the French revolution, a sentimental comedy focusing on mistaken identity, and a tragédie bourgeoise involving a husband, a wife, and their efforts to re-unite despite the actions of a relentless and implacable foe. »
09 Sep 2009
After thoroughly enjoying Daneille de Niese’s recording Handel Arias, I jumped at the chance to review her new recording, The Mozart Album. Her Handel interpretation was full of coloratura, clarity and virtuosity, along with an organic fusion of music serving drama. So I was eager to hear her perform Mozart. »
09 Sep 2009
This 4-CD set gathers together solo recital material and extracts from complete opera sets that Franco Corelli recorded between 1959 and 1968, the prime of his career. »
06 Sep 2009
“Opera has so much to give” says Christof Loy, whose new production of Tristan und Isoldeopens at the Royal Opera House on 29th September. This opera is so familiar that everyone assumes they know it. But Loy’s approach involves going straight back to the score, and to the inherent drama in the music. “I don’t like superficial distractions". »
06 Sep 2009
“Can it be?”“It can’t!”“But it is; he looks just like him…” »
06 Sep 2009
On the surface, the theme of this Prom seemed to be Sci Fi movies at the Proms. Both Ligeti's Atmosphères and Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra became huge hits when Stanley Kubrick used them in 2001 : A Space Odyssey. So how did Mahler's *Kindertotenlieder* fit in ? »
06 Sep 2009
The Wagner Festspiel loves to provoke. »
06 Sep 2009
In 2001, when Seattle Opera completed its current production of Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen, it seemed the company had taken a step backward. In appearance the new Ring — the third full SO staging since Glynn Ross set out to make the city the American counterpart to Germany’s Bayreuth — was traditional. »
06 Sep 2009
For the eighteenth program of its seventy-fifth anniversary season the Grant Park Music Festival under the direction of its principal conductor Carlos Kalmar gave two performances of Sir Edward Elgar’s monumental oratorio for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, The Dream of Gerontius. »
30 Aug 2009
Following from the fine collaboration between Stephan Genz and Roger Vignoles on an ambitious collection of various sets of Mahler’s Lieder (Hyperion CD 67392), which includes some of the composer’s early settings of poetry from the anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the present recording contains thirteen later settings from that source. »
30 Aug 2009
This 1958 RAI broadcast of Bellini's early masterpiece requires the accustomed aural compromise for maximum enjoyment. »
30 Aug 2009
Central City stages luminous Lucia
There’s the sextet, the greatest “hit” in all of opera when Caruso was in the cast, and there’s the “Mad Scene,” that exercise in vocal acrobatics that brought new glory to bel canto when the opera was new in Naples in 1835. »
30 Aug 2009
The opera venue at Macerata shares some features with its famous counterpart in Verona: both are outdoors, with huge stages that can accommodate spectacular productions. »
30 Aug 2009
Fidelio is not just any opera. But then, Beethoven is not just any composer. His only opera — unless one counts Leonore as a work in itself — confounds bureaucratic expectations. »
30 Aug 2009
Each year, the tiny Tuscan village Torre del Lago hosts a festival dedicated to its favorite son, Giacomo Puccini. This year’s Puccini Festival (10 July - 30 August) featured a “new” Manon Lescaut (a co-production with Opera del Nice Theater), its premiere garnering standing ovations for Marcello Giordani and Martina Serafin and accolades for Alberto Veronesi, the artistic director of the Festival. »
30 Aug 2009
As the detail-filled booklet essay to this CPO set reminds its readers, Franz Lehär's operettas enjoyed widespread, though rarely lasting, success, with the music theater world of the time eager for each successive work. »
30 Aug 2009
Franz Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten isn't the easiest opera to produce, with its grand effects, but this production comes close to being a perfect union between stage and music. »
30 Aug 2009
De Staat is a seminally important work. So much modern music stems from it, not only “serious” classical music but progressive popular music too. It “is” music theatre, for it’s designed to be experienced live, the visual effect part of the action. »
23 Aug 2009
August is when Italians immerse themselves in the primal soup of all life. Hordes swarm to the Mediterranean shores and multitudes arrive in Pesaro on the Adriatic, where just then crowds of Rossinians from around the world arrive to partake of their primal operatic soup. »
23 Aug 2009
The bravura performance by Ferruccio Furlanetto in the title role is spoiled by the kitschy and incoherent staging of this production. Mefistofele is unique among operas based on the Faust legend in that it rather closely adheres to Goethe’s version. »
23 Aug 2009
Gustav Mahler was not alone in setting verses from Hans Bethge’s collection of Chinese-inspired poetry entitled Die chinesische Flöte, as he did in his symphonic song cycle Das Lied von der Erde. »
23 Aug 2009
Although the cutesy title sounds like something conjured up by a community
college marketing intern working for a mid-sized city orchestra’s ticket
office—where every concert featuring Wagner and Brahms gets the sobriquet
“Teutonic Titans”—don’t be put off by the moniker. This film is a brilliant adaptation of Monteverdi’s Fourth Book of Madrigals that is totally faithful to the composer’s music. »
23 Aug 2009
Good directors don't always create good productions. »
23 Aug 2009
The two one-act operas - operettes? - on this disc play something like mediocre episodes of The Twilight Zone set to music, though without the quirky memorability of that show's opening theme. »
23 Aug 2009
Everyone once in a while, we veteran opera-goers are privileged to see a promising artist give a break-out performance that announces a giant step forward into major stardom.
»
17 Aug 2009
On a good night an opera performance can come across with visceral excitement without a classy production, top-name singers, or the benefit of being of one of the more familiar titles. »
17 Aug 2009
It is never easy to revive a success. Audiences will remember the first run of a show and consciously or not, compare a revival with earlier favorable impressions. »
17 Aug 2009
Those opera lovers prone to rage at the perceived dominance of the director in their beloved art form today may collapse in apoplexy at this first release from the company called SignumVision. »
17 Aug 2009
The word "living" would be a fitting addition to the subtitle of this collection of "Songs by American Composers." »
17 Aug 2009
What drives Harrison Birtwistle to Greek myth? Orpheus is a primal archetype. When he played his lyre he tamed wild beasts and made mountains move. But he suffered. He journeyed into Hades but could not bring Eurydice, his beloved, back to life. In some versions of the myth, his talent enraged the jealous who tore him apart. Yet even then, his head remained intact, still singing. He symbolizes the power of music, and the fate of an artist. »
17 Aug 2009
"An all-American Norma," Roger Pines calls this release in his entertaining booklet essay. »
09 Aug 2009
This excellent production of Monteverdi’s final (premiered in 1643) and most problematic opera features first-rate singing and a very effective (and restrained) staging. »
09 Aug 2009
You need three or, ideally, four top-flight bel canto specialists to do anything like justice to Rossini’s Semiramide, his last and grandest Italian score. Otherwise why go to the expense? »
07 Aug 2009
In the Euroarts series Discovering Masterpieces of Classical Music: Documentary & Performance, the volume devoted to Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra stands out as a particularly accessible and well-executed release. »
07 Aug 2009
For adherents of the prima voce school of opera appreciation, this Laurent Pelly production of Donizetti's comic masterpiece may not hold that much appeal. »
06 Aug 2009
L’inganno is this year’s theme at the Sferisterio Festival in Macerata, Italy. »
05 Aug 2009
Why — they always ask — why — present
Les Huguenots? »
03 Aug 2009
Although Antonio Vivaldi’s instrumental compositions were highly popular in his lifetime, and have been held in high regard throughout the centuries, most of his operas have been — until recently — relegated to obscurity. »
03 Aug 2009
EMI's publicity for this studio recording focuses on soprano Angela Gheorghiu and her portrayal of Cio-Cio-San. »
02 Aug 2009
Paris Opera seems to posit the question: Does anyone completely understand what Karol Szymanowski’s King Roger is about? »
02 Aug 2009
Of Donizetti's 55 operas, four to five hold on to secure places in the repertory, a much greater number are all but unknown, and in the middle come the titles that see occasional revivals, as flawed but fascinating rarities. »
02 Aug 2009
This looks like a winner, with an esteemed conductor (Zubin Mehta), top-rank cast (Violeta Urmana, Marcello Giordani, Carlo Guelfi), and a production directed by Nicholas Joël that originated at the Opernhaus Zürich, a house that takes some chances and scores some successes. »
01 Aug 2009
Can a famously successful movie be made into an effective opera? A
quick answer is: yes! »
29 Jul 2009
The performance of lieder is a partnership between singer and pianist. In May I heard Julius Drake redeem an indifferent recital by the sheer beauty of his playing. I’ve been listening to him for more than 15 years. He’s a favorite. So I was completely taken by surprise by this recital »
29 Jul 2009
The legacy of Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) includes some notable compositions, and among them is his unique setting of the Faust story. »
27 Jul 2009
A fine-sounding Santa Fe Opera orchestra, excellently conducted by Frédéric
Chaslin, was barely into the haunting, delicate prelude to Act I of La
traviata, when a funeral procession, wet umbrellas unfurled, arrived to
wend its way though a stage full of big grey marble rectangular boxes,
handsomely abstracted tomb shapes, soon to be the courtesan Violetta
Valéry’s destination. So much for the Prelude to Act I. »
22 Jul 2009
There she is, in her inch or two of sarong, floating, floating…Oh, excuse me, where was I? »
22 Jul 2009
The strategies of non-traditional opera directors are becoming as predictable and formulaic as the stuffy, static traditional productions that they work so hard not to emulate. »
21 Jul 2009
There are rare times when a critic can just enjoy, and say “Wow!” »
21 Jul 2009
Tosca is the quintessential Roman opera, with a plot located in
three infamous landmarks of Rome, its 1900 premiere in Rome was bound to be
enormously successful. »
20 Jul 2009
If the economic downturn has canceled some opera lovers plans to attend any of the appealing European summer festivals, perhaps a trip online will find a DVD of a production from a recent year. »
20 Jul 2009
Were someone looking to assemble a musical Dream Team to thrill us to the core with Wagner’s Lohengrin, one would need look no further than the assembled forces currently on stage at Munich's Bavarian State Opera. »
19 Jul 2009
The Proms reach people all over the world, bringing them together for a kind of international street party, celebrating a shared love of music. If the arts make us more human and humane, then the BBC Proms are a force for good. »
19 Jul 2009
The Aix Festival imagines itself one of Europe’s great festivals, defining itself as the crossroads of European culture. »
19 Jul 2009
This year’s program at the Aix-en-Provence Festival includes
Götterdämmerung, the much-anticipated final installment of the
Ring co-sponsored by Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and the Osterfestspiele Salzburg. »
19 Jul 2009
At the festival of Aix-en-Provence, now in its sixty-first year, the final installment of Wagner’s “Ring,” with Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, has hogged the spotlight. »
19 Jul 2009
‘I never left a theatre more contented, and all night I dreamed of The Creation of the world.’ — the view of one of those at the first performance of The Creation in 1799. »
19 Jul 2009
A roster of exciting young artists supported by the Concertgebouw Orchestra
in the pit, ensured that Amsterdam’s Carmen worked its
usual spell. »
15 Jul 2009
Readers may recognize the author of this book, David J. Buch, a specialist on the origins of the libretto to Mozart’s Magic Flute. »
14 Jul 2009
Music-masters, singing lessons and serenading bands all abound in
Rossini’s comic masterpiece, Il Barbiere di Sivilglia, but at
this performance it was the medical rather than the musical puns which drew the
loudest laughs. »
12 Jul 2009
This revival of Jonathan Kent’s 2006 production of Tosca brings to an end the ROH’s ‘Italian Season’ in fine style. »
09 Jul 2009
Like a baseball player with a low batting average but a propensity for home runs, Gaetano Donizetti composed dozens of operas, among which only a very few get frequent performances today. »
09 Jul 2009
Years before Antonin Dvořák composed his most famous opera Rusalka (1900), he completed a series of works in the genre which contributed to his reputation and skill in this genre. »
07 Jul 2009
With its’ title taken from the composer’s Suite of English Folk Tunes, Op. 90, Tony Palmer’s film Benjamin Britten: A Time There Was… is a solid documentary assembled from interviews, rehearsal clips, photographs and other audio-visual materials to create a vivid portrait of the composer. »
07 Jul 2009
Absence of plot is by no means an impediment in opera. »
04 Jul 2009
Ravenna once served as the capital of the Roman Empire in the 5th and 6th centuries C.E. »
03 Jul 2009
For Americans of older generations Porgy and Bess is surely a primal experience, formed by the 1959 Otto Preminger film with Sammy Davis Jr. as Sportin’ Life, the audio recording derived from the 1952 London production with Leontyne Price as Bess, and a first encounter with Porgy and Bess as an opera in the artistically satisfying, and well traveled 1976 Houston production (was it twenty-five performances in the War Memorial Opera House?). »
03 Jul 2009
The success of Opera Theatre of St. Louis’ 2009 festival season reflects the intelligent leadership of both the previous triumvirate (Charles MacKay, Colin Graham, and Stephen Lord) and the new recruits Timothy O’Leary and James Robinson. »
02 Jul 2009
Bizet’s famed heroine Carmen returned this June to the place where it all began, in a critically-heralded new production by Adrian Noble. Frank Cadenhead was on hand to experience the staging held at the opulent newly-renovated Opéra Comique. »
29 Jun 2009
It’s not often that the accompanist is given top billing in a vocal recital, even when he’s the venue’s musical director. »
29 Jun 2009
Glyndebourne is the epitome of British opera festivals. Seventy-five years ago, John Christie founded the tradition of “country house opera”, where opera can be enjoyed in beautiful settings. »
29 Jun 2009
On the whole, I’d prefer the conspirators to be sitting on toilets… »
26 Jun 2009
With Götterdämmerung, a co-production with the Köln Opera House created by Robert Carsen (stage direction), Patrick Kinmonth (sets and costumes) and
Jeffrey Tate (conductor), La Fenice approaches completion of the
Ring cycle. »
26 Jun 2009
Four years have passed since the most celebrated American soprano of recent times, Renée Fleming, graced the stage at Covent Garden, in Elijah Moshinsky’s classic production of Otello. »
25 Jun 2009
Le Grand Macabre is the only opera of György Ligéti, one of the
major composers of the 20th century. »
25 Jun 2009
What is the worst opera with the best music? »
24 Jun 2009
Much ink has been spilled over the failed Marta Domingo production of La
Traviata that San Francisco Opera inexplicably imported for its blatantly
audience baiting summer season (Traviata, Tosca, Porgy and Bess). »
24 Jun 2009
The Gala release of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony from Hamburg performances on 29 and 30 November 1954 serves to document further the composer’s presence in the concerto hall prior to the well-known Mahler-renewal in 1960. »
24 Jun 2009
Amato Opera went to the netherworld of expired extravaganzas this spring, a
one-man operation whose one man was weary. As New York’s oldest
down-the-block and semi-pro company, it’s loss was regrettable —
though it’s many years since Amato gave up doing interesting repertory. »
24 Jun 2009
It is quite possible that Opera Theatre of Saint Louis is the leading summer opera destination in the United States. »
22 Jun 2009
A performance of sublime authority from Goerne and Eschenbach »
21 Jun 2009
Following the death of the American film director Anthony Minghella, ENO were left with a gap in the season vacated by the new production which he had been engaged to direct, and what better way to do so than by bringing back his immensely popular 2005 staging of Madam Butterfly? Minghella’s widow, Carolyn Choa (who has worked on the production from its original conception) was charged with resurrecting the production in tribute. »
21 Jun 2009
Last week (May 27), “without further a-don’t,” as she adorably puts it, Madame Vera Galupe-Borszkh, the world’s reigning traumatic soprano
— lately, she says, more of a soprano “spento” — bade a
last, lingering, loving farewell to her adoring public in a sold-out concert at
the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. »
21 Jun 2009
The Collegiate Chorale (ably supported by the orchestra of the New York City
Opera under George Manahan) chose Gluck’s Alceste, last heard in
New York at the City Opera in 1982, for its annual spring concert opera —
an excellent choice for a chorus eager to show its stuff. »
21 Jun 2009
Robert Carsen’s production of Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not new, as the La Scala playbill suggests. »
21 Jun 2009
La Cenerentola runs third in popularity among Rossini’s comic
operas — the Met didn’t get around to it at all until the present
staging was created for Cecilia Bartoli. »
21 Jun 2009
Very little is known about Giovanni Battista Draghi (or Drago, according to certain sources), known as Pergolesi. »
20 Jun 2009
To the sorrow of all lovers of baroque opera, J.S. Bach never composed for
the stage. »
19 Jun 2009
When Matthias Goerne was six, he heard Winterreise and was captivated. »
19 Jun 2009
Although there was considerable theatrical imagination on display, redemption was in critically short supply in Peter Konwitschny's production of The Flying Dutchman at Munich’s estimable Bavarian State Opera. »
18 Jun 2009
“Life is too important to be taken seriously” goes the motto. That could describe this cheerful production, just the right good humored tonic for these difficult times. »
18 Jun 2009
Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s early opera, Punch and Judy, premiered at Aldeburgh in 1968. Benjamin Britten reportedly walked out. Now Birtwistle is himself the pre-eminent British composer, whose work has long since become part of the Aldeburgh tradition. This year’s Festival opened with two Birtwistle premieres, The Corridor and Semper Dowland, simper dolens. »
17 Jun 2009
In a recent Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert featuring twentieth-century
instrumental and vocal compositions Ian Bostridge sang Benjamin Britten’s
Les Illuminations under the direction of principal conductor Bernard
Haitink. »
17 Jun 2009
Bostridge traded his fey haircut for slicked back Kray brothers look, complete with wrap round dark glasses in this Dreigroschenoper at the Barbican, London. »
17 Jun 2009
Strikes on the London Underground system may have made this a particularly exhausting and exasperating week for Londoners, but despite these wearing adversities Friday evening saw an eager crowd flock to the Wigmore Hall, in excited anticipation of an inspiring and invigorating blend of the familiar and the unfamiliar — and they were not disappointed. »
17 Jun 2009
Matthias Goerne and Christoph Eschenbach unite in a Schöne Müllerin of searing intensity. »
17 Jun 2009
“Mozart's first mature masterpiece,” Sophie Becker calls Idomeneo in the booklet essay of this DVD set of a June 2008 Bayerische Staatsoper staging. »
15 Jun 2009
The Austrian Ministry of Culture and the Committee for the Celebrations of
Haydn’s Bicentenary had a brilliant idea: on May 31st , the day of the
composer’s death, 20 symphony orchestras and/or opera houses performed
one of his greatest and best known oratorios Die Schöpfung (The
Creation) . »
15 Jun 2009
From the La Scala series of filmed productions come two excellent DVDs, one an incisive and contemporary staging by Patrice Chereau of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, and the other a rip-roaring, old-fashioned (in the best sense) performance of Donizetti's flawed but entertaining Maria Stuarda.
»
14 Jun 2009
Where else in the world does one have three opera houses, all playing almost nightly for 10 months of the year? It’s one of the things that makes Berlin paradise for opera buffs. »
12 Jun 2009
Like Carmen, Tosca is a constant presence in our operatic lives, frequently revisited like it or not. »
12 Jun 2009
Otto Nicolai's Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor belongs to that somewhat purgatorial group of operas best remembered only for their overtures. »
09 Jun 2009
ENO's latest new production of Così — their third this decade — made the arts headlines from the start of its rehearsal period when director Abbas Kiarostami found himself unable to secure a UK visa and was forced to withdraw his direct involvement, leaving colleague Elaine Tyler-Hall to deputise. »
07 Jun 2009
The buzz was right — this new Lulu at the Royal Opera House, London is shockingly different. Christof Loy's production is what minimalism should be. »
07 Jun 2009
Julius Drake’s Temple song series is almost a cult secret -not known to the mass market but highly regarded among those who know, much like the Lieder genre itself. »
26 May 2009
Joseph Haydn's place in the history of the oratorio has been secured by his masterpieces The Creation (1798) and The Seasons (1801). His first appearance, however, on the Mount Parnassus of oratorio was a good quarter of a century beforehand with Il ritorno di Tobia. »
26 May 2009
The new Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Ruggero Leoncavallo “Pagliacci” reached the Teatro dell’Opera di Rome on May 19 : I will be on stage in the Italian capital every night until May 27th . Then, it will continue a worldwide tour: its debut was in Florence in the 2008 Fall. It has already visited Moscow and Athens. It is rumored to reach the MET next seasons. »
26 May 2009
“Pique Dame” (“Pivokaja Dama” or “The Queen of Spades”) is one of Pyotr I. Tchaikovsky most difficult, and most expensive, operas to produce. »
22 May 2009
English Touring Opera continued its 30th anniversary celebrations with six concert performances of Norma, sung — unusually for ETO — in Italian, in a touring footprint which has some common ground with the ongoing staged tour of Katya Kabanova and The Magic Flute, but which is effectively an entirely separate tour. »
22 May 2009
Tim Albery’s production was first seen at Opera North in 1993 and has not been revived since 1998, when it was the first production of this opera I ever saw — an English-sung version of the four-act Italian version. »
21 May 2009
Lieder and opera are different worlds. But understanding the differences helps us appreciate what makes each form distinct. Hugo Wolf’s songs come close to bridging the genres. They’ve been described as “miniature operas” where dramas are distilled into compact form. »
21 May 2009
In its recent collection Mozart Lieder, Salzburg 1958-1984 in its series entitled “Festspiel Dokumente,” Orfeo pays homage to the tradition of Liederabend at the Salzburg Festival with selections from a quarter century of performances. »
17 May 2009
Bringing Andrei Şerban’s Turandot to the Washington National Opera as a season finale really means finishing the year with a bang. »
17 May 2009
You won’t get much argument nowadays — you won’t get any from me — if you call Handel’s dramatic oratorios operas in all but name. »
14 May 2009
On any list of great but seldom-performed operas, Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz must rank high. »
14 May 2009
L’elisir d’amore is perhaps Donizetti’s silliest opera — but also one of his most charming.
»
14 May 2009
Recorded live in concert on 19 August 2007, this performance of Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony by Claudio Abbado is part of the conductor's cycle involving the Lucerne Festival. »
13 May 2009
In David Alden’s extraordinary new staging of Britten’s
masterpiece, with sets by Paul Steinberg, the Borough is populated by stylised
grotesques, a clever twist on the opera’s existing ‘Little
England’ character stereotypes. »
13 May 2009
The Scottish Play’s ability to conduit bad luck is apparently not limited to the spoken stage, witness the new Paris Opéra production of Verdi’s Macbeth. »
12 May 2009
It’s the Ring — not just an ordinary evening (or four evenings) of opera — indeed, if you accept its creator’s words on the matter, it’s a music-drama, not an opera at all. »
12 May 2009
How often does one experience an opera in which everything works — in which there is not one flaw either in the staging or in its musical dimensions? »
12 May 2009
As far as world premieres go, Houston Grand Opera is in elite company in the United States, having performed thirty-eight new works prior to opening night of André Previn’s new opera Brief Encounter. »
12 May 2009
By sheer coincidence, the Academy of Santa Cecilia — one of the most authoritative symphonic orchestras in Europe — planned a rather unusual concert in the same days (May 3-7) when just in the very same auditorium there was the world première of a movie expected to be a Hollywood blockbuster — the thriller titled “Angels & Demons”. »
12 May 2009
For two years following its premiere Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsesnk was one of the most often performed contemporary operas. »
12 May 2009
Soprano Kate Royal is reported to have said that singing at the Wigmore Hall is “like a religious experience”. »
12 May 2009
Recorded four years apart, these two classic recordings of Leos Janáček's dramatic masterpieces now reappear in Decca's The Originals series, thankfully still with full librettos and excellent booklet essays. »
12 May 2009
Christine Brewer Commands Performance in Last Minute Appearance »
07 May 2009
Doris Sennefelder's booklet essay for this CPO recording of Lehar's Das Land des Lächelns details how close the composer was to Puccini. »
05 May 2009
It’s an odd day in opera when the bad girl wins, but that is only one thing that makes the Opera Atelier production of Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppea remarkable — and admirable. »
03 May 2009
April 29th is Zubin Mehta’s birthday. As a gift to its most beloved musical director, Florence unveiled a new production of Götterdämmerung, a joint Ring Cycle venture with the Valencia Opera started two years ago. »
29 Apr 2009
From the word “go”, the audience feels that this “Maria Stuarda” is quite different from the standard fare offered by Italian theatres. »
29 Apr 2009
I first saw this production in Manchester in 1981: I loved it then and love it now, despite the present hero’s un-Heldentenor qualities when compared to the glorious Peter Hoffman of yore. »
26 Apr 2009
One of the five operas Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876-1948) based on plays by Carlo Goldoni, La vedova scaltra (1748) is a comedy about a widow’s decision to use deception to choose among her suitors. »
26 Apr 2009
I returned to Don Giovanni firstly because I had never heard Peter Mattei sing, and friends had called him the greatest Don G since Siepi. »
26 Apr 2009
The Recovered Voices series at Los Angeles Opera, in its second season, springs from James Conlon’s fascination and love for the operas of composers whose lives and/or careers came to an end under the Nazi regime. »
26 Apr 2009
Razor-wielding rascals involve themselves in romantic complications in the two sets considered here, with a fine performance of a rarity and an even finer performance of a classic.
»
26 Apr 2009
In 2008 the Salzburg Festival intended to bring back the two stars of their triumphant 2005 La Traviata, Rolando Villazón and Anna Netrebko, for Gounod's Roméo et Juliette. »
26 Apr 2009
Try to imagine the scenario: You’re an opera company, giving concert
performances of neglected, indeed forgotten, hundred-year-old scores (no sets, no costumes, at least you don’t have those headaches), and you give young singers a chance to do their stuff once a year before a paying New York crowd actually eager to hear music they do not know, and you’ve lit on a genuine obscurity, even in the ranks of the obscure; Mascagni’s penultimate stage work, a huge success at the premiere (as his operas usually were), utterly forgotten nowadays (as, but for Cavalleria Rusticana and, on rare occasion, L’Amico Fritz, they pretty much are), and it’s never been performed in North America ever. »
24 Apr 2009
The Teatro Lirico di Cagliari is a sparkling comparatively new building in what used to be a blighted area near to the city center. »
22 Apr 2009
The Bavarian State Opera’s new production of Leos Janacek’s Jenufa is a feather in the cap of intendant Nikolaus Bachler. »
19 Apr 2009
In the continuing series of releases to document the recorded legacy of the Staatskapelle Dresden, vol. 13 collects music by Hans Pfitzner and Richard Strauss with performances from 1939 through 1944. »
19 Apr 2009
In its new production of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) Lyric Opera of Chicago has achieved a fusion of eighteenth-century sensibilities with a modern adaptation of traditional dramatic and stage techniques. »
19 Apr 2009
Perhaps I’d better just describe what I experienced, Captain. »
19 Apr 2009
The Los Angeles Opera audiences seem to have decided that no matter how they may really feel about Achim Freyer’s “performance art” staging of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, the singers and musicians are giving them at long last a chance to hear these monumental works at the Dorothy Chandler. »
19 Apr 2009
Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s music drama Die tote Stadt has had a rather erratic life in major opera houses. »
19 Apr 2009
On a stormy evening in Houston (both in and outside of the house), Houston Grand Opera’s opening night production of Verdi’s Rigoletto went off with a thunderous bang. »
19 Apr 2009
Schubert’s music ‘suggests a rippling movement and by the side of the rippling a flowering: it has the variety and unsurprising naturalness of moving water and springing herb’ (Capell) and this same naturalness and sense of flowing ease are the very qualities which make John Mark Ainsley such a special interpreter of this composer. »
19 Apr 2009
Rome’s opera house was built in 1880, in the explosion of building that followed the unification of Italy with Rome as its capital. »
10 Apr 2009
Rigoletto is the ideal first opera: a taut tale, comprehensible characters, terrific tunes, and not an ounce of fat anywhere. »
10 Apr 2009
Was Tony Kushner’s monumental play Angels in America in need of being musicalized? »
08 Apr 2009
This two-CD budget series collection brings together two Placido Domingo Wagner recitals, the first from 2000, with Deborah Voigt receiving co-billing, and the second from 2002. »
07 Apr 2009
Originally directed by Brooks Riley for German television, this updated staging of Engelbert Humperdinck’s familiar opera Hänsel und Gretel is based on a production created by Johannes Felsenstein, the son of the well-known director of the Komische Oper Berlin, Walter Felsenstein. »
07 Apr 2009
The current revival of Cav and Pag at the Met went off like clockwork, with all the comfort and reliability that implies for a repertory house and all the success these tried and true verismo stalwarts merit. »
07 Apr 2009
London: Sue Loder reviews Alessandro and the Handel Singing Final »
06 Apr 2009
I cursed myself for not having turned on the television sooner. »
06 Apr 2009
In the parlance of a Hollywood film pitch, Britten's penultimate opera might be described as "War Requiem" meets "Turn of the Screw." »
06 Apr 2009
Like Violetta Urmana, Nadja Michael had a substantial career as a mezzo before deciding to venture into soprano territory. »
02 Apr 2009
William Kentridge is a South African artist who works in charcoal and eraser (smudges) on paper, in small animated film and video segments (black and white), in theater, and now in opera. Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses was his first operatic project that took place in 1998 in collaboration with South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Theater. »
01 Apr 2009
In the current weak economy many an opera company has retrenched its programming to present primarily the most popular operas. »
01 Apr 2009
If combining the anniversaries of both Purcell and Handel in one production at the Royal Opera was something of a master-stroke, then getting the Royal Ballet in on the act must have seemed to be verging on the brilliant from a commercial point of view. »
31 Mar 2009
When considering his next recording project, notes Rolando Villazón, the idea of working on a set of Handel arias with Paul McCreesh was “not an obvious choice.” »
30 Mar 2009
Mention Macbeth — The Opera and most think of Verdi. Ernest Bloch took on the subject more than half a century later, in Paris in 1910, when Verdi’s version was almost as obscure as Bloch’s is today. »
30 Mar 2009
Many works by Martinů will be performed in this year’s commemoration of the anniversary of his death, but it would be hard to equal the impact of this performance. Much of its success was due to Kožená, whose presence illuminated the whole opera, even though her moments on stage were fleeting. »
29 Mar 2009
Naïve re-releases the soundtrack to the film Farinelli here in a handsome “book” casing, appending a second disc of highlights from the discography of Christophe Rousset’s recordings with Les Talens Lyriques, the artists also responsible for the soundtrack. »
27 Mar 2009
In the world of opera it’s now the director who is the top banana. »
25 Mar 2009
Janáček enthusiasts in London have been spoiled this month: opening the day before English Touring Opera’s Katya Kabanova, David Alden’s staging of Jenůfa made a welcome return to the Coliseum following its original double Olivier Award-winning run in 2006. »
25 Mar 2009
Seven discs, of 170 tracks, amounting to over eight hours of music - this EMI set somehow manages to be both voluminous and narrow in its portrait of Paul Robeson. »
25 Mar 2009
I had been looking forward to it for weeks — really, for years. »
25 Mar 2009
In 1831, when Vincenzo Bellini composed this pastorale full of characters who never express any but sincere emotions (with the exception of Lisa, the calculating flirt), he certainly intended them, and their feelings, and therefore their story, to be taken seriously – or he would not have given them such seriously lovely music. »
25 Mar 2009
For nearly a decade after its premiere, in 1853, Il Trovatore was the most popular opera, perhaps the most popular stage work on the planet — even more than Rigoletto or Ernani, and far more than Traviata, which had its premiere the following autumn. »
24 Mar 2009
Schubert was desperate to be an opera composer — or so one might surmise from the many (at least 18) attempts he made to make a name for himself as a man of the theatre. »
24 Mar 2009
English Touring Opera is 30 years old this year, and has never been more adventurous. »
22 Mar 2009
Among the impressive contributions to the American song literature of the twentieth century are works by Samuel Barber (1910-81), whose efforts in this genre reflect his own musical training as a singer, as well as the influence of his aunt, Louise Homer, whose professional relationships put her nephew in contact with other vocalists of the day. »
19 Mar 2009
Heinrich Brockes’s famous poetic setting of the Passion, Der für die Sünden der Welt gemarterte und sterbende Jesus (1712), was one of the most significant devotional texts of its day in Germany. »
15 Mar 2009
Each Australia state maintains its own opera company. The dominant company is Opera Australia, a permanent ensemble based at the Sydney Opera House but which originated in the Melbourne based National Theatre Opera Company in the 1940s. »
15 Mar 2009
LOS ANGELES: On February 21 the capacity audience in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was overwhelmed by the staging of Das Rheingold that launched the Los Angeles Opera’s new production of Der Ring des Nibelungen. So was Wagner. »
15 Mar 2009
Had a misunderstanding with your truelove lately? Tough job straightening things out? »
15 Mar 2009
This DVD contains the contents of four televised recitals of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, with no way of telling from the information provided whether the recitals are presented complete or not. »
15 Mar 2009
Hey man, you wanna take a trip? Groovy!
»
15 Mar 2009
The birth and death dates of Domenico Sarro (1679 and 1744) are very close to those of his more illustrious contemporary, Antonio Vivaldi. »
15 Mar 2009
Apparently Opera Rara “discovered” Giovanni Simone Mayr some years ago when it included several excerpts from his operas in their multi-volume series, “A Hundred Years of Italian Opera.” »
15 Mar 2009
Although an ineffable aura of the 1960s emanates from Michael Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time, its composition came at the start of WWII in Europe. »
15 Mar 2009
A Decca recording artist for most of his career, Luciano Pavarotti did do a very few items with EMI, probably as part of those “artist-swapping” arrangements recording labels sometime arrange. »
15 Mar 2009
There is some slim irony to an opera company pursuing the complicated business of staging Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in the current economy — it entails the very sort of dubious compromises that get Wotan and crew into such hot water (if one assumes the cataclysmic fire at the end of Götterdämmerung heated the Rhine). »
08 Mar 2009
By the close of the first act of Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde in its current production at Lyric Opera of Chicago the audience has been given a strong impression of the multi-faceted characters bound up in the musical drama unfolding on stage. »
08 Mar 2009
After a problematic debut last Autumn with Der fliegende Holländer at the Barbican, London’s newest opera-in-concert outfit returned this month with Fidelio at the smaller Cadogan Hall. »
08 Mar 2009
A medieval tale of ill-starred love, in three very long acts, with questions of loyalty to a king and one title character urging another to drink from a cup of poison... »
08 Mar 2009
It is not often that the team of stage director, set and costume designer get the biggest, most boisterously rowdy roar of approval at opera's end. »
05 Mar 2009
To say that Dr Atomic landed in London with a bang is shocking, but the subject it deals with is meant to be disturbing. Unlike the scientists at Los Alamos, we can’t live in denial of the wider implications. This isn’t history. It’s a universal dilemma, utterly relevant today. »
05 Mar 2009
Jonathan Miller's new production of Puccini's wintry opera was denied its planned opening night on Monday 2nd February by a bout of unusually heavy snow which brought most of London's transport services to a halt and turned it into a virtual ghost town (thus, up the road at Covent Garden, the cancellation of a performance of Korngold's 'Die tote Stadt' was equally ironic). »
05 Mar 2009
Recorded on 9 November 1959 at Symphony Hall (now Symphony Center), this recent issue of a classic performed of Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde translates the then state-of-the-art RCA “Living Stereo” sound for the LP vinyl medium to the enhanced sound currently available in SACD format. »
05 Mar 2009
There is a visceral pleasure in hearing so many healthy sets of young lungs tearing into this music, and they do sing, they do not bellow. »
27 Feb 2009
This Der fliegende Holländer was eagerly awaited as it hasn’t been heard at the Royal Opera House, London, since 2000. With Bryn Terfel’s return to Covent Garden as the Dutchman guaranteed a full house. »
27 Feb 2009
Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia, his 30th opera, is based on Victor Hugo’s play of the same name, and had its premiere at La Scala in 1833. »
25 Feb 2009
The Plague of Beautiful Sounds: Has Bel Canto gone too far? »
25 Feb 2009
Jérôme Savary, director of this December 2007 Semperoper Dresden production of Lehár's Die Lustige Witwe, expresses a view in the booklet essay that many others will probably share: "What I like most of all about The Merry Widow is its music, which is literally bursting with colours, gyrating movements and sensuality..." »
25 Feb 2009
There come nights in the opera season where gesamtkunstwerke won’t do — enough of epic masterpieces and supreme lyric outpourings of the human spirit! »
25 Feb 2009
My heart didn't exactly leap in joyful anticipation as I entered the Frankfurt Opera and saw the Arabella pre-set on stage: a big, shallow, white box. »
24 Feb 2009
Handel operas are like London buses — you wait for ages and then 3 come along together. »
22 Feb 2009
Ferrucio Furlanetto apparently loves the temperate climes of San Diego in California's equivalent of late winter. »
15 Feb 2009
The Kurt Weill-composed operetta Arms and the Cow premiered in 1935 under the title A Kingdom for a Cow, according to Erwin Berger’s booklet essay for this DVD of a 2007 VolksOper Vien staging of David Pountney’s production. »
13 Feb 2009
Some opera aficionados who take a look at the contents of this two-CD Fritz Wunderlich collection from Profil might shake their heads in bemused wonder: the German lyric tenor as Turridu, let alone Pinkerton and Rodolfo? »
13 Feb 2009
The CEO of the Ravenna Festival, one Cristina Mazzavillano Muti, understandably takes top billing at the top of this DVD booklet's three - count 'em, 3! - pages of credits for the Festival, not counting the single page of credits for the production of Donizetti's Don Pasquale itself. »
10 Feb 2009
Superlatives were in short supply when the curtain fell on Tristan und Isolde at Chicago Lyric Opera on January 27. »
08 Feb 2009
‘Back by popular demand’ claimed ENO’s publicity material for the
21-year-old production which had its supposed swan-song last season – though it remains questionable whether the company ever really intended to get rid of it. »
08 Feb 2009
Die tote Stadt is Korngold’s masterpiece in the old sense of the word, when a craftsman would produce a dazzling work to show the world what he could do. This is Korngold’s manifesto, so to speak. »
08 Feb 2009
Entering the Linbury Studio for this production of The Beggar’s Opera, one might have been forgiven for thinking that one had wandered into the main house by mistake. »
08 Feb 2009
The emergence of a standardized western liturgy with a uniform chant repertory, while to a significant degree realized, neither completely silenced regional liturgies nor extinguished the additions to liturgical practice that comprise much medieval creativity. »
08 Feb 2009
Pushkin’s poem Eugene Onegin is the first of the great line of Russian novels, passionately loved by all the literate of that most literary nation. »
08 Feb 2009
One definition of “poach” is “to take or appropriate something unfairly.” »
08 Feb 2009
Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie / De Munt started 2009 by serving up a real New Year's treat for the Belgian capital's opera enthusiasts: a near-perfect staging of Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice. »
01 Feb 2009
The Greek princes Arsace (alto) and Armindo (alto) are seeking handsome Queen Partenope (soprano), who has just founded the city of Naples, in marriage. »
27 Jan 2009
I had never personally imagined mythical Hercules as a WWF Wrestler-cum-Caveman but damn if Dutch National Opera's staging of Francesco Cavalli's Ercole Amante didn't almost persuade me it could be so. »
27 Jan 2009
A sticker on the cover of the Decca DVD Jessye Norman a portrait describes the contents as "An intimate new film portrait of the great soprano." »
26 Jan 2009
I am an ardent fan of Stephanie Blythe, and if you revel in sheer sound, she will delight you, too. »
26 Jan 2009
Writer Jens F. Laurson reports from Munich, where a new staging of Hans Pfitzner's Palestrina opened Jan. 19 at the National Theater. The rarely-performed 1917 three-act opera stars Christopher Ventris in the title role. »
26 Jan 2009
The first solo operatic recital from the great German bass René Pape bears a title that serves as an homage to an esteemed predecessor, George London. »
26 Jan 2009
A traditional production of Mozart and Schikaneder's singspiel Die Zauberflöte can go for charm, fantasy, and enjoyable camp. It can also turn trite and cloying. »
26 Jan 2009
The title of Anna Netrebko's most recent recital disc apparently springs from the musical selections' ability to prompt memories in the singer. »
26 Jan 2009
On this 1955 recording of Dvořák's folk-tale based comic romp Kate and the Devil, conductor Zdenĕk Chalaba offers a lighter, faster approach than that heard on the modern studio version Supraphon released in 1981, under conductor Jiří Pinkas. »
19 Jan 2009
The two performances of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra given at Carnegie Hall — the New York City Opera’s only performances this year while the State Theater is in rehab and the company is in flux — may or may not prove to be swan song of New York’s gallant number two company, whose succession of identity crises have been so fascinating to observe — and hear — over the decades. »
14 Jan 2009
More than just three letters distinguishes "rarity" from "oddity." In opera, a rarity would be an admired work seldom performed. »
14 Jan 2009
“Mary Lewis, the golden haired soprano” — does that name mean much to today’s lovers of singing and good music? »
14 Jan 2009
Some of the more ingenious opera productions of the twentieth century are the work of Walter Felsenstein, who renowned internationally for his efforts in the genre. »
14 Jan 2009
Unjustly neglected, Dvorák’s Lieder are among his most engaging works, and this selection of some of his most important contributions to the genre demonstrate the range of emotions and the breadth of expression the composer used in these works. »
07 Jan 2009
This performance of Le Nozze di Figaro, recorded live at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in June 2004, prompts much admiration for René Jacobs, its conductor. »
07 Jan 2009
The first thing that hits you about the Met’s production of La Rondine is the beauty of the sets and costumes (from the classy team of Ezio Frigerio and Franca Squarciapino, respectively) — especially in contrast to the tawdry glitz of the recent Thaïs. »
26 Dec 2008
Everyone who likes Massenet’s Thaïs seems to feel obliged to apologize for it, or to become defensive: it’s not that bad, they all seem to say. »
23 Dec 2008
Can we call The Play of Daniel an opera, or “music drama” (as this performance put it), when such terms did not exist, and would not exist for centuries to come when the piece was devised, around 1200, by the cathedral chapter of Beauvais? »
22 Dec 2008
Dynamic offers devotees of classical era opera a rare and quite rewarding opportunity to hear I Giuochi d'Agrigento, a little-known opera by Giovanni Paisiello, best known as the man who composed a popular Barbiere di Siviglia before Rossini came along and eclipsed his predecessor. »
22 Dec 2008
An annual event televised around the world, the Vienna Philharmonic's Neujahrskonzert has become a classical music institution, and as such is impervious to criticism. But not beyond it. »
22 Dec 2008
Ondine provides a treasure of a booklet for Fever, Karita Mattila's traversal of some standards from the so-called "Great American Songbook," plus two Brazilian numbers. »
22 Dec 2008
In its new production this fall season of Alban Berg’s Lulu, Lyric Opera of Chicago has achieved a near ideal synthesis of music and drama. »
22 Dec 2008
Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel is titled a Märchenspiel — a Fairytale: and as twentieth-century psychologists and psychoanalysts have been eager to inform us, lurking beneath those familiar saccharine stories of sleeping princesses, defeated tyrants, love fulfilled and harmony restored, lie the dark shadows of the human heart — passionate, violent, unpredictable and unredeemed. »
22 Dec 2008
The Metropolitan Opera’s high-definition broadcast on radio and by satellite to movie theatres around the Nation, December 20 was Jules Massent’s 1894 star vehicle, Thaïs — the sadly ironic tale of a 4th Century Egyptian courtesan who grows tired of the long hours and demanding nature of her work, and is thinking of a career change. »
18 Dec 2008
It almost seems as if every composer was entitled to have at least one unfinished work. »
14 Dec 2008
Back in June, in my review of The Pilgrim’s Progress at Sadler’s
Wells, I wrote about the valuable and unsurpassed work being done by Richard Hickox to champion the works of Ralph Vaughan Williams in the composer’s centenary year, a project of which this rare staging of Riders to the Sea for ENO was to be the culmination. »
12 Dec 2008
Much has been promised of London Lyric Opera. The newest company on the capital’s opera scene, it will collaborate with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to specialise in full-scale concert performances with high-profile soloists. »
11 Dec 2008
Brussels’ reliably excellent De Munt/La Monnaie Opera served up a Rusalka that was theatrically vivid, musically resplendent, and cheered to the rafters at its premiere. »
08 Dec 2008
Elektra begins with an explosion and remains, with a few lyric interludes, on that extreme pitch throughout its two hours. »
07 Dec 2008
Glyndebourne Touring Opera has long been bringing its wares to the further reaches of the southern United Kingdom and its current package of Hansel und Gretel, Carmen and The Magic Flute has been drawing good crowds from Norwich in the east to Plymouth in the south-west. »
05 Dec 2008
The bad luck of last season’s Tristans seems to be edging into the present one — but the curse now finds the house better prepared for trouble. »
05 Dec 2008
Released to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the three multi-disc sets of recordings makes available recordings that document the triumphs of the ensemble since its founding in 1932 by Sir Thomas Beecham. »
05 Dec 2008
Like Seville’s peripatetic barber, Gran Teatro del Liceu's new Marriage of Figaro is rather all over the place. »
02 Dec 2008
It was, of course, coincidence. When the Chicago Lyric Opera scheduled George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess for the current season, not even the preludes to the 2008 presidential election had begun. »
02 Dec 2008
Not all of Munich's holiday delights are to be found at the just-opened annual Christmas Market filling the Marienplatz and environs. »
01 Dec 2008
From the director’s point of view, there are two ways to approach staging an opera. »
01 Dec 2008
Can this truly be the production of Verdi's Aida that earned world-wide headlines in December 2007? »
01 Dec 2008
Alberto Cantù's booklet essay for the Dynamic release of Umberto Giordano's rare one-act opera Marcella quotes a review from the day after the 1907 premiere, which indicates that the premiere's audience's expectations of "greater originality of melodic invention" went unmet. »
28 Nov 2008
The opening performance of the ROH’s seventh revival of John Schlesinger’s 1980 production of The Tales of Hoffmann was
dedicated to the memory of Richard Hickox. »
25 Nov 2008
Pelléas et Mélisande in a 200 seat theatre, with just 35 musicians and no pit? »
25 Nov 2008
There are two things which, in recent history, English National Opera has consistently done extremely well. »
25 Nov 2008
The show curtain was an illustration of the typical Parisian skyline. »
25 Nov 2008
Marlis Petersen, the much lauded "Lulu-du-jour," brought her well-traveled portrayal of Berg's complex heroine to Chicago Lyric Opera and she alone was almost worth the price of admission. »
21 Nov 2008
This 2001 Zürich performance of Rossini's masterpiece Il Barbiere di Siviglia boasts one of the final performances of the great bass Nicolai Ghiaurov, who passed away in 2004. »
20 Nov 2008
Naxos, in conjunction with SWR, has been releasing recordings from the Rossini in Wildbad Festival, which focuses not just on the titular composer but also on his contemporaries. »
19 Nov 2008
The rare Rossini opera which brought Juan Diego Flórez to international attention in Pesaro in 1996 was thrown together by the composer at the last minute to meet a deadline in February 1821, with a plot from one source and characters from another, and bits of the score filled in by Pacini. »
18 Nov 2008
As Tom Stoppard put it, “There is an art to the building up of suspense.” »
17 Nov 2008
Following a recent visit to Germany, Wes Blomster surveys the vibrant opera scene in Berlin and Magdeburg. »
17 Nov 2008
The Met has not staged La Damnation de Faust in a hundred years, since 1906, when it clocked a mere five performances. »
16 Nov 2008
When La Traviata had its first performance, in Venice in 1853, it was a scandal. »
16 Nov 2008
After a somewhat shaky start to the season, as my recently posted review of La traviata attests, Washington National Opera has added considerable luster to its roster this November with the infusion of spectacle and star power in two new productions. »
16 Nov 2008
Wozzeck stands ankle deep in water on the flooded stage of the Bavarian State Opera, above him hovers a huge, movable box – the dingy apartment he shares with Marie and their adolescent bastard – and he is surrounded by a freak-show worthy of a George Groszian nightmare and worse. »
16 Nov 2008
The "2" in this disc's title indicates that this is the second Chandos recital for Sir Thomas Allen. »
13 Nov 2008
At a time when it is the fashion for stage direction, sets, and costumes to have little, if anything to do with the ouvre presented on stage, this production of Jean-Baptiste Lully's Persée (1682) is candy for the eyes and ears, with adherence to what is known of the French Baroque operatic standards.1 »
13 Nov 2008
“This won’t be a total Schlacht of sound” said the director, Charles Edwards, of this production. Instead, it’s a strikingly intelligent interpretation, focusing on the deeper aspects of the drama. »
13 Nov 2008
It is incredibly unfashionable nowadays to stage opera straightforwardly. Welsh National Opera’s recent lavish staging of Otello prompted a dismissive reception from the critics. »
09 Nov 2008
There are remnants of snobbery in San Francisco that are happiest when San Francisco Opera
associates itself with the likes of Vienna State Opera and Covent Garden, and left positively
frightened at the idea of a production from Opera Colorado/Fort Worth Opera/et al. on the War
Memorial Opera House stage. »
09 Nov 2008
EMI owns this recording, so if pride dictates they repackage it in the "Great Recordings of the Century" series, a dissenter shouldn't moralize. »
09 Nov 2008
Both these performances come from mid-2005. Teatro Regio di Parma presented the Ernani in May of that year; August saw I Capuletti e I Montecchi on stage at the Festival della Valle d'Itria di Martina Franca. »
09 Nov 2008
Countless must be the number of true opera fans who have heard well-meaning acquaintances say, "Oh I just love opera! Especially Phantom of the Opera." »
07 Nov 2008
The current revival of Georges Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers at Lyric Opera of Chicago (seen 25 October) brings together an exceptionally strong cast. »
07 Nov 2008
In 1830, three years after the death of Beethoven and two after Schubert’s untimely demise, Berlioz, 27, dazzled the world with his phantasmagoric — perhaps drug-inspired — Symphonie fantastique. »
04 Nov 2008
As performed just now by the San Francisco Opera Mussorgsky’s initial (1869), seven scene version of Boris Godunov revealed itself a finished masterpiece. »
04 Nov 2008
Of their two tours per year, English Touring Opera tends to channel the majority of the budget into the Spring season, and the Autumn tour – despite a focus in recent years on some high-quality Baroque chamber works, which lend themselves well to the size of the venues around the UK which the company visits – can be rather noticeably the poor relation. »
04 Nov 2008
“Opera directing is very different to theatre directing”, says Charles Edwards, director of Elektra at the Royal Opera House this season. “It has to be the music that motivates you”. For this production, he works with Mark Elder, “an extraordinarily theatrically-minded conductor who sees theatre in everything he hears”. »
02 Nov 2008
A few years ago EMI released a recording of Wagner duets with Placido Domingo and Deborah Voigt. »
02 Nov 2008
What opera contains a terrific overture, a wedding sextet, two murderous magical potions, a mad scene for coloratura soprano, a magnificent a cappella aria for contralto, dozens of glorious melodies and lots of nifty choral writing? »
02 Nov 2008
I was just itching to experience the new Oslo Opera House ever since I saw the pictures of its grand opening (ahead of schedule, thank-you-very-much) last April. »
02 Nov 2008
Is Boston Baroque period performance’s best kept secret? »
31 Oct 2008
Mary Zimmerman’s unmusical production of Lucia certainly improves if you give it a cast of singers who know what Donizetti is about. »
31 Oct 2008
The fascination of Don Giovanni lies not only in the bejeweled score but in the interplay of its eight intriguing characters, each based on an ancient type, yet each somehow cut loose from the formula da Ponte molded so well. »
30 Oct 2008
While the tributes and retrospectives continue to appear for the late Luciano Pavarotti, his sometime-colleague (if not rival) Plácido Domingo maintains a top-rank career, even including a contract with Deutsche Grammophon for new studio work. »
30 Oct 2008
Gala may be a budget label, but more opera sets of vintage live performances deserve a booklet essay as concise yet comprehensive, critically honest and yet fair, as Andrew Palmer's for this set, which preserves a 1980 performance of Richard Strauss and Joseph Grigor's Die Liebe der Danae. »
24 Oct 2008
Pimlico Opera is based at the Grange in Hampshire, home of the Grange Park opera festival, but pre-dates its sister company by a decade and has been giving national tours of popular operas since the 1980s as well as doing some pioneering opera and music theatre projects in UK prisons. »
24 Oct 2008
Bach’s monumental Mass in b minor exists in an abundant quantity of period performances to the point where one might ponder the wisdom of adding yet another to the shelf. »
24 Oct 2008
The good news (make that “great news”) is that conductor Dennis Russell Davies had total command over this ever-shifting composition, one minute lyrical and introspective, the next soaring and rhapsodic, the next percussive and agitated. »
23 Oct 2008
In recent years it’s the headgear of the ice-hearted princess that is often the major source of awe and excitement in productions of Puccini’s incomplete final opera. »
23 Oct 2008
Joanot Martorell’s 1490 “Tirant lo Blanc” isn’t on anyone’s reading list these days, and that’s rather a shame, for it — the first Catalan novel — was a favorite book of Miguel de Cervantes. »
21 Oct 2008
Munich in 1781 was hardly the big city, not an enlightened Paris where Gluck had recently turned the opera world on its ear, not a European capital like Vienna where Italian operatic imperialism was unassailable. »
21 Oct 2008
“One can easily imagine -- Berkeley professor Donald J. Grout wrote in 1979 -- a Scarlatti oratorio occasionally being sung in church or in concert […], but it is more difficult (though perhaps not quite impossible) to imagine a Scarlatti opera being staged at a modern opera house”. »
21 Oct 2008
In this new staging of Handel's comic rarity for English National Opera, director Christopher Alden has chosen to tell the classical tale of amorous and political intrigue through the world of the artistic elite of the 1920s/30s. »
21 Oct 2008
Staging La traviata for an opera company these days is an experience akin to that of a symphony’s orchestra programming Mozart: a great idea fraught with disaster. »
21 Oct 2008
We ought to consider – as opera’s current reigning soprano, Karita Mattila, has certainly considered, though I’m not so sure about director Jürgen Flimm – who, what, and how old Salome is. »
21 Oct 2008
It probably wasn’t intended as a symbol of anything in particular, but at the end of Act II, midway through the October 6 performance of La Gioconda, Enzo’s ship failed to burst into flames, thereby letting the curtain down most unsatisfactorily on what is usually one of the liveliest act finales in grand opera. »
21 Oct 2008
By the time he completed Le Roi d’Ys, in 1888, Edouard Lalo was sixty-five, approaching the end of a successful career as a chamber violinist. »
21 Oct 2008
A funny thing happened on the way to the convent. Manon Lescaut, a pretty little girl with a taste for pretty things, became sidetracked by a pretty young man. »
20 Oct 2008
There is much to admire in Masaaki Suzuki’s Bach performances with the Bach Collegium Japan, and this recording of excerpts from the St. Matthew Passion will remind the listener of the diverse ways in which this is so. »
20 Oct 2008
Among the recent releases on DVD of Rolf Liebermann's productions of operas from the Hamburg Opera conceived for television in the late 1960s, Beethoven's Fidelio is impressive for the use of the medium of film to bring out the personal aspects of this intensive opera. »
08 Oct 2008
For the opening of the 2008/09 season at ENO, Richard Jones has teamed up with two separate theatrical writers, Sean O'Brien and Lee Hall, to create unique new versions of the repertoire's most famous double bill. »
06 Oct 2008
Presented in its fine line of “Originals,” Decca’s reissue of Solti’s famous 1967 recording of Verdi’s Requiem is actually offered with another fine recording, the same conductor’s 1977/78 performance of the Quattro pezzi sacri. »
06 Oct 2008
In recent years, Emmanuelle Haïm has achieved prominence at the helm of several baroque operas, including Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo and Handel’s Rodelinda and Giulio Cesare. »
06 Oct 2008
It can be difficult to inject life into a production which has been a staple of a company’s repertoire for over twenty years. »
06 Oct 2008
If Munich’s new Macbeth production does anything, it stirs emotions and draws heated response. »
06 Oct 2008
Decades ago a New Yorker cartoon showed a very little girl standing on tip-toe to return a book to a matronly librarian. »
03 Oct 2008
Korngold’s third opera Die tote Stadt premiered in 1920 in Cologne, the composer a mere 23 years old. Back then, opera remained a living art form, with the likes of Strauss and Puccini keeping the public excited about new works. »
29 Sep 2008
The second offering of the current WNO season is a San Diego Opera production of Georges Bizet’s Pearl Fishers (1863). »
28 Sep 2008
Planet Earth laid waste by forces beyond our control, hunger and drought squeezing humanity out of existence whilst those in charge look on, laughing, lusting and concerned only with their own power struggles – does this sound familiar? »
22 Sep 2008
Musically and dramatically Ferdinando Paer’s Leonora and Beethoven’s Fidelio might be said to belong respectively to pre- and post-revolutionary ages. »
22 Sep 2008
A few seasons back, Los Angeles Opera invited William Friedkin to direct a double-bill of Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle and Puccini's Gianni Schicchi. »
22 Sep 2008
Although Jacobus Vaet, Antonius Galli and Pieter Maessens are little-known composers today, this impressive recording featuring their music, the debut recording by the ensemble Cinquecento, may serve as a cautionary reminder that modern familiarity is often the fruit of circumstance and not necessarily a reliable measure of artistic achievement. »
19 Sep 2008
Iannis Xenakis once stood among the leading composers of the avant-garde, mentioned in a (long, drawn-out, amelodic, taped and fed back) breath with Babbitt, Berio, Boulez, Henze, Penderecki and Stockhausen: internationally famous among academics, ignored or deplored by the concert-going public. »
19 Sep 2008
Last year saw Cecilia Bartoli’s recording dedicated to the memory, and repertoire, of the early 19th century singer Maria Malibran, “Maria.” »
16 Sep 2008
The Verdi Requiem is a regular feature at the Proms, having appeared every few years in past decades, usually to full houses. »
16 Sep 2008
Sunday 24th August at the Proms promised a day dedicated to the music of Bach, beginning with an organ recital in the afternoon by Simon Preston and ending with a late-night performance of the first three of the six Cello Suites by Chinese cellist Jian Wang by way of a palate-cleanser. »
14 Sep 2008
The Last Night of the Proms is notorious because it’s an excuse for jingoistic excess. »
14 Sep 2008
There may be no name more famous in the world of film music than that of Bernard Herrmann. William Perry, however, is a name unlikely to set off many bells. »
14 Sep 2008
Of these three productions staged for the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the beautifully dressed Entführung and refined Tancredi present the company as a theater for tasteful, stylish productions, just a tad on the dull side. »
09 Sep 2008
Even a concert performance of Messiaen’s St François d’Assise could hardly fail to be an event. »
08 Sep 2008
Luciano Pavoritti died on September 6, 2007. The all-too-ample figure and the fables associated with him are already retreating from memory. »
08 Sep 2008
Every time an artist walks onto the performance stage, he or she attempts to give the performance of their lives, focusing on everything they have learned prior to, and giving of themselves in an unprecedented way. »
07 Sep 2008
Kashchey is a gnarled old ogre who imprisons a beautiful young princess in his gloomy underworld. It’s classic psychodrama. Kashchey has supernatural powers, so how can the Princess be saved ? »
07 Sep 2008
I’ve rarely seen a performance of Tristan und Isolde where I was quite so conscious of the singers’ teeth. »
07 Sep 2008
The startup of a new opera company is always cause for cheering; it is getting harder and harder (that is, more and more expensive) to do, especially in New York. »
07 Sep 2008
Because Turangâlìla is such a panorama, taking in Hollywood, Hindus and Peruvians, Wagner and Gurrelieder, it’s easy to assume it’s all surface Technicolor. »
07 Sep 2008
Perhaps it will be enough to tell you that I wasn’t halfway through this book before I searched the web for a copy of Professor Ewans’s study of Wagner and Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and ordered it forthwith: It has to be good. »
05 Sep 2008
The Netherlands Opera opened its season at the Muziektheater with a stunning new production of Die Frau ohne Schatten, setting the bar very high indeed for all that is to follow in the repertoire. »
04 Sep 2008
Although performances of Handel’s more obscure large-scale works are relatively common in London, it is far less common that they are given in a venue as large and high-profile as the Royal Albert Hall, with a line-up of conductor and soloists that will attract a full house for a lengthy and static work on a hot summer evening. »
03 Sep 2008
Janáček’s music has already been well served in this year’s Proms in a memorable evening conducted by Boulez (reviewed on this site by Anne Ozorio). »
29 Aug 2008
With the revival of a 1876 Cleopatra by the local composer Lauro Rossi, a couple of world premieres in chamber opera and sacred oratorio (by Marco Tutino and Alberto Colla, respectively) and Verdi’s Attila canceled because of budget constraints, the 44th installment of the Macerata Festival will nevertheless be remembered as a bumper season, if one not particularly friendly to mainstream taste. »
29 Aug 2008
The venerable Wagner Festival in Bayreuth has never shied away from provocative productions. »
26 Aug 2008
In a nod to the 150th anniversary of Puccini's birth, the Manchester-based BBC Philharmonic Orchestra visited the Proms with their chief conductor, Gianandrea Noseda, for a performance of the first opera of Il trittico. »
26 Aug 2008
“Only in the realm of the dead is everything pure.” »
21 Aug 2008
Contrary to popular assumption, Janáček wasn’t “folkloric” per se, much as he loved his Moravian heritage. Boulez’s perceptive approach shows how inventive and original Janáček’s music can be. »
21 Aug 2008
I hoped it was not an omen of the evening to come at Torre del Lago’s Puccini Festival, when the audience was made to wait at the closed gates until about twenty minutes before curtain rise, listening to the orchestra and chorus a hundred yards away rehearse chunks of that night’s Edgar. »
19 Aug 2008
Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s annual appearance at the Proms is always an eagerly-awaited event, but there is a varying degree of success with which the productions adapt from a full staging at Glyndebourne to a semi-staging suitable for the small platform and cavernous space of the Royal Albert Hall. »
19 Aug 2008
A soprano originally from South Africa and a tenor from Sweden sang their way to top honors in the 2008 International Wagner Competition staged by the Seattle Opera on August 16 in Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, the company's handsome home. »
18 Aug 2008
“Stage direction should not follow fashion, for fashion is the sister of death”. »
17 Aug 2008
The haunting, unsettling opening moments of the Glyndebourne premiere of Peter Eötvös’ “Love and Other Demons” promised much, with sensitive playing by the solo celesta and harp, flutter-tongued flutes, and jarring bass stings. »
17 Aug 2008
The lyricism characteristic of the instrumental music of Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) is at the core of his songs, and the two collections found on this recording represent his vocal music well. »
17 Aug 2008
The 100th anniversary of his birth inevitably produces a flood of releases from the catalog of conductor Herbert von Karajan. »
17 Aug 2008
Bedrich Smetana (1824-1884) is, perhaps known best for his opera The Bartered Bride (1863, rev. 1870), a touchstone of comic opera fused with eastern-European nationalism and, as much as that work has much to offer, his other efforts deserve attention. »
17 Aug 2008
Premiered in 1938 in Zurich, Mathis der Maler was then the most recent of Paul Hindemith’s provocative operas. »
17 Aug 2008
The festal days of Christmas, New Year’s, St. Stephen and St. Thomas Becket are rich in musical celebration, and this recording from the Orlando Consort brings together a wide range of organa, motets, chansons, and carols to remind us of that fact. »
30 Jul 2008
Star-studded casts graced end of the season performances at the Wiener Staatsoper, with two versions of Verdi’s Don Carlo on its menu. »
30 Jul 2008
For its ninth program of the Summer 2008 season the Grant Park Music Festival offered a balance of vocal, choral, and orchestral works from the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. »
30 Jul 2008
I discovered many delights in my first ever visit to the Chautauqua Opera, not least of which was the lovely environment of the hilly Chautauqua Institution grounds which are dotted with picturesque and inviting old frame houses. »
30 Jul 2008
The novelty feature drawing veteran opera enthusiasts in general, and Richard Wagnerites in particular to Glimmerglass Opera this summer is that composer’s “Das Liebesverbot,” in what is touted as the North American fully staged premiere of this seldom-talked-about-and-even-less-performed early piece. »
30 Jul 2008
For two years, the subdued rumble of anticipation had been building to a forte. »
30 Jul 2008
The Philharmonia Orchestra has made a far more comprehensive effort than any other British ensemble to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the death of Ralph Vaughan Williams, with concerts taking place over the course of seven months in London, Leicester and Bedford including a complete symphony cycle. »
29 Jul 2008
Dynamic now offers most of its product in CD and DVD formats, the latter in High Definition, no less. »
29 Jul 2008
With these three CDs of highlights from three Verdi operas - Nabucco, Il Trovatore, and Aida — Classics for Pleasure gives a snapshot of the arc of his career. »
28 Jul 2008
Chinese bass Hao Jiang Tian was 30, when he enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Denver 1983. »
23 Jul 2008
It’s not so long ago that the opening night of the Proms was given over to a single major choral work, but in more recent times it has become more of an overt opener to the season, presenting a taster menu of the themes running through the season’s subsequent 70-plus concerts. »
22 Jul 2008
Eugenia Zukerman asked for a 10-minute chamber work — a piano quintet, perhaps — and she got Green Sneakers for Baritone, String Quartet and Empty Chair, which lasts exactly an hour. »
20 Jul 2008
“Quelle plaisir” to encounter Gustave Charpentier’s seldom performed “Louise” at the Paris Opera in a production where most everything went spectacularly right. »
20 Jul 2008
The Bayerische Staatsoper, based in three spectacular houses where Mozart, Wagner and many other composers premiered their works, presents over 300 annual performances to a discerning public. »
20 Jul 2008
The opera world, always ravenous for talented, charismatic tenors, felt desperate hunger pains last summer, when Rolando Villazón canceled dates with an explanation that a health crisis necessitated a sabbatical from singing. »
20 Jul 2008
With a composer as widely beloved as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, for an opera to be all but forgotten suggests the work has problems beyond redemption. »
20 Jul 2008
For the opera of average length, a decent highlights disc can feature as much as half the score. »
13 Jul 2008
Bernd Alois Zimmermann was a sensitive, none too healthy 21-year-old music prodigy in 1939, when he was drafted into the German army. »
13 Jul 2008
For Sir William Walton, the protracted genesis of Troilus and Cressida must have seemed more akin to the agonies of Sisyphus than to the composition of an opera. »
13 Jul 2008
Originating at the Châtelet, where the narration was given in French, Robert Carsen's staging of Bernstein's unique satire worked rather well in its television broadcast from the Parisian house late in 2006. »
13 Jul 2008
The disastrous 1904 La Scala premiere of Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly is one of those famous annals of opera which tend to leave today’s audiences perplexed about all the uproar. »
13 Jul 2008
At the Rossini Festival held in Pesaro, Italy, Dynamic recorded two Rossini rarities in August 2006. »
13 Jul 2008
The concert “20th-Century Masters,” presented by the Grant Park Music Festival, Chicago on 27 and 28 June 2008 featured several pieces performed for the first time under the auspices of the Festival. »
13 Jul 2008
The late Guiseppe Sinopoli (1946-2001) became established as an estimable conductor of nineteenth-century music, and his legacy includes a number of fine recordings. »
06 Jul 2008
David Gockley heard the cries of many an opera fan that Pamela Rosenberg had denied them their 'stars,' so for his summer season, 2008, he brought them Natalie Dessay, Susan Graham, Ruth Ann Swenson, and Stefan Margita. »
06 Jul 2008
The best thing about this set, a Norma recorded live at the Teatro delle Muse di Ancona in late 2004, is the booklet essay by Marco Beghelli, offered in both English and Italian (no credit to any translator). »
06 Jul 2008
My visit to two rarely mounted pieces at the Opera Festival of St. Louis brought to mind the little girl with the curl, for when it was good, it was very very good and when it was bad, it was, um. . .er. . . »
06 Jul 2008
At one time, Verdi’s Aida figured as the most performed opera. »
23 Jun 2008
In the latter part of last year, the casting for Nicholas Hytner’s new production of Don Carlo — in the five-act Italian version — looked to be on shaky ground. »
23 Jun 2008
No one has ever called Gazzaniga’s Don Giovanni an overlooked masterpiece. »
22 Jun 2008
This Dynamic recording of Meyerbeer's Semiramide, an opera title more familiar with Rossini's name appended, mixes the pleasure of a modestly appealing surprise with regret at key aspects of the performance. »
22 Jun 2008
Pink flamingos, sheep on wheels, and a queen crowned with giant antlers all inhabit the zany world of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’s Una cosa rara, where the artificial 18th century pastoral commingles with cutesy country colors and 1950s yard art. »
22 Jun 2008
Among the choral music of Anton [Antonin] Dvorak, the familiar Stabat Mater, Op. 58, is known to modern audiences through various live performances and recordings. »
19 Jun 2008
A nostalgic charm permeates these filmed productions from the early 1970s of Lortzing's Zar und Zimmerman and Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, collaborations between the Hamburg State Opera and German TV director Joachim Hess. »
19 Jun 2008
The opera highlights series from Classics for Pleasure continues its recycling of the EMI catalogue with selections from two of Herbert von Karajan's recordings. »
15 Jun 2008
On the barren stage: a few chairs, a dark-gold hectoplasm projected on the wood panels of the acoustic chamber - nothing more. »
15 Jun 2008
For the belated Spanish premiere of Britten’s Death in Venice, 35 years after its creation in Aldeburgh, Barcelona seems a felicitous choice. »
09 Jun 2008
With this recording of songs by Henry & William Lawes, musical brothers who flourished in Caroline England, countertenor Robin Blaze with lutenist Elizabeth Kenny continue their exploration of early English song for Hyperion, and the results are stunning. »
09 Jun 2008
For Bellini’s “I Capuleti e i Montecchi,” Paris Opera peopled its revival with plenty of star power. »
09 Jun 2008
When the Ringling Brothers folded their tents, opera took over. Aïda with elephants, and Walküre with real horses. »
09 Jun 2008
It is a bit hard to know what to make of Olivier Messiaen’s colossal piece “Saint François d’Assise,” beautifully mounted by Netherlands Opera. »
08 Jun 2008
If you are going to produce Jacques Fromental Halevy’s forgotten opera “Clari,” I urge you to first make sure you have a signature on the contact from a superstar with the firepower of Cecilia Bartoli. »
04 Jun 2008
The title of this recording “Joy: the Laments of Gilles Binchois” introduces a seeming contradiction, one that plays on a contemporaneous description of the composer as "pére de joyeusetè"—the father of joy—in tension with an affinity for melancholy in his works. »
04 Jun 2008
Even though it is one of the important operas of the twentieth century, Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron is, perhaps, more esteemed than performed. »
04 Jun 2008
It is worth remembering that prior to the première of Strauss’s opera in 1911, the working title was ‘Ochs auf Lerchenau’. »
04 Jun 2008
Opera producers in quest of headlines, unable to make them from the limited number of Mozart operas available (all of them far too familiar) but equipped with the flood of attractive young singers trained to sing Mozart in conservatories (because singing Mozart does not harm young voices, and
singing Verdi and Wagner before 30 — better yet, 40 — often will), sometimes turn to Mozart’s contemporary, Cimarosa, and his Il Matrimonio Segreto, to get attention. »
04 Jun 2008
Handel’s Rodrigo, subtitled ‘Vincer se stesso è la maggior vittoria’ (Self-conquest is the greater victory) is one of the composer’s earliest operatic works, and rarely heard. »
28 May 2008
Chicago Opera Theater scored a resounding success with its area premiere of John Adams’ newest stage piece, “A Flowering Tree.” »
28 May 2008
Upon its premiere at Chicago’s Lyric Opera in 1997 Anthony Davis’ Amistad found little critical favor. Its undisciplined excesses led one writer to compare it to a high-school pageant. »
27 May 2008
Two excellent books on opera have come to hand, providing many hours of entertaining reading. I combine notice of them with a few thoughts about composer Paul Moravec’s CDs, and his forthcoming opera premiere at Santa Fe Opera in 2009. »
27 May 2008
In these days of 'concept' productions, it is rare that the curtain goes up on the first act of an opera and it looks exactly as one might reasonably expect it to. »
27 May 2008
I can still remember my first ever “Pelleas et Melisande” in my first ever outing at San Francisco Opera during my first ever visit to that beautiful town. »
25 May 2008
A recent visit to Berlin’s three opera houses yielded decidedly, nay wildly varying outcomes. »
25 May 2008
Premiered in 1926, Paul Hindemith’s opera Cardillac is a three-act work based on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story Das Fräulein von Scuderi. »
25 May 2008
In the 1983 production designed, staged, and directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, this recording of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is a solid and well-thought performance that has much to offer. »
15 May 2008
Recorded between 1938 and 1942, the excerpts from performances of Der Rosenkavalier, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Arabella, and Daphne at the Dresden Staatsoper are all conducted by Karl Böhm. »
15 May 2008
The Gotham Chamber Opera has been delighting opera fans on the Lower East Side for seven years now, one small audience at a time. »
13 May 2008
Thirty-six years after Sarah Caldwell and the Opera Company of Boston presented the first complete staged performances in the United States, Hector Berlioz’ Les Troyens returned to Boston in triumph in a series of concert performances presented by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the baton of James Levine to close the BSO’s 2007-2008 season. »
13 May 2008
Opera companies should practice historic preservation, keeping certain productions forever in the repertory because of their quality and aesthetic value. »
13 May 2008
Prometeo is so radically different that it’s almost incomprehensible heard from preconceived assumptions of what music “ought” to be. »
13 May 2008
Claudio Monteverdi. Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in patria. Edited by Rinaldo Alessandrini. Urtext. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2007. BA 8791. A vocal score is available as 8791a. »
12 May 2008
John Brown might have been a’mouldering in his grave since he was hanged in 1859, but he was resurrected — in body and spirit — on May 3, when the Lyric Opera of Kansas City staged the world premiere of Kirke Mechem’s John Brown. »
09 May 2008
When Toronto’s Opera Atelier asked her to sing Elettra in Mozart’s Idomeneo Measha Brueggergosman hesitated. »
09 May 2008
In 2007 it was an experiment; now it’s a new summer festival firmly rooted in fertile Texas turf with a bright view of its second season and of the more distant future as well. »
09 May 2008
Operas do not often get a second chance. A new work is premiered and — if it’s a co-commission — it moves on to another company or two. »
07 May 2008
Die Entführung aus dem Serail is too light to be a grand opera, but it makes rather grander demands of its singers than operetta could possibly bear. »
06 May 2008
At the centenary of the birth of the conductor Herbert von Karajan various commemorations are occurring, an among them is the concise CD and DVD release by Deutsche Grammophon, with both discs bound into a booklet that includes a short prose tribute to the man illustrated with some well-chosen photographs from various parts of his career. »
06 May 2008
English National Opera’s production of Harrison Birtwistle’s ‘Punch and Judy’ is the company’s second collaboration with the Young Vic Theatre — following the premiere of Neuwirth’s ‘Lost Highway’ a few weeks earlier — and remarkably, also the second London production of this early Birtwistle work within a month, the previous one having been at the Linbury Studio Theatre, a collaboration between Music Theatre Wales and the Royal Opera. »
06 May 2008
Over the years, one tried and true method of packing audiences in to the concerts of Robert Bass’s Collegiate Chorale has been to present concert opera with impressive soloists. »
06 May 2008
Consumers might opt for a highlights set instead of a full recording of an opera for many reasons. »
06 May 2008
Naxos's DVD division has already released the performances on this disc of Virgil Thomson's scores for The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River, as soundtracks for a re-release of the original films. That DVD (Naxos 2.110521) contained, as... »
04 May 2008
Martha Graham used to say, “In order for there to be dance, there must be something that needs to be danced.” »
04 May 2008
When the Met presented La Fille du Régiment for Lily Pons during World War II, she sought permission to wave the Cross of Lorraine, symbol of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French, during the Salut à la France in Act II. »
04 May 2008
Why does one so seldom encounter Dvořák’s Rusalka on stage? »
27 Apr 2008
As difficult as it is to identify a single score as representative of its composer, Symphony no. 8 in C minor by Anton Bruckner is an essential work that may be regarded as the quintessence of his accomplishments in the form. »
25 Apr 2008
Satyagraha is an odd duck to encounter if you are seeking a traditional opera-going experience or anything like it. »
23 Apr 2008
Victor DeRenzi is a man of convictions — and of courage. Given his commitment to tradition, you might call DeRenzi, artistic director of Sarasota Opera since 1982, conservative. »
22 Apr 2008
With what might (if one were risking facetiousness) be termed a “false-set” of four countertenors in the cast, this was always going to be an intriguing production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare for aficionados of a voice type which has revolutionised the perception (and popularity) of baroque opera over the past 15 years. »
21 Apr 2008
Harrison Birtwistle’s new full-scale opera, commissioned by the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, is a study of isolation and imprisonment. »
21 Apr 2008
It was one of Queler’s good nights. »
21 Apr 2008
This production offers a different view of Norma. As Stage Director Guy Joosten explains in the introduction on the first of a 2-disc set, he wanted to give the audience “more” of what he believes the modern audience expects. »
21 Apr 2008
It is, you might say, the little opera that can. True, if it’s size of the budget, the price of tickets and the number of seats that concerns you, the Komische Oper is clearly the third of Berlin’s opera houses. »
21 Apr 2008
What to make of "Lucrezia Borgia"? I have always felt that, some lovely arias notwithstanding, this Donizetti work never really gets going until the slam-bang soprano-baritone duet in Act II. »
09 Apr 2008
That Fed Dostoevsky – sure plays a mean pinball! »
08 Apr 2008
If Friedrich August Kummer is not a household word in your home, no reason for concern — he is one of the prolific Kleinmeistern of the post-Beethoven generation, a generation for which the cost of printing had dropped so much that it was financially possible for a composer to produce hundreds of published opuses. »
08 Apr 2008
Plainly put, Frankfurt Opera’s “The Rape of Lucretia” could be offered as a textbook example of just how great a performance can be when everything goes right. »
07 Apr 2008
BERLIN — Which car-rental agency was it that was once No. 2 and “trying harder?” »
06 Apr 2008
In a climate in which bel canto opera seems to be enjoying a steady and welcome revival, ETO opened their current season with a welcome production of Donizetti's historically dubious account of the latter days of Anne Boleyn. The company's... »
06 Apr 2008
The most interesting opera on ETO's Spring 2008 tour was Carlisle Floyd's 1950s tale of religious hypocrisy in the rural Deep South, based on the Apocryphal tale of Susannah and the Elders. »
06 Apr 2008
The last of the three operas on ETO's Spring 2008 tour was sung in English, and updated to a Spain of the mid-twentieth century under Franco. »
06 Apr 2008
This installment of John Eliot Gardiner’s impressive Bach Cantata Pilgrimage comes from close to the end of his millennial Wanderjahr, presenting cantatas for Christmas week. »
06 Apr 2008
Opera companies often tout new productions as a major attraction of their seasons. »
06 Apr 2008
Timeless values of great opera conducting fill this disc of overtures and preludes, all conducted by Tullio Serafin. »
30 Mar 2008
William Byrd’s affinity for the Latin motet found various outlets. »
30 Mar 2008
A frequent complaint about contemporary operas — or most any after Puccini's Turandot — is the lack of that memorable lyricism found in the standard repertory. »
30 Mar 2008
From a relatively obscure label — Osteria — comes this 1962 live recording of Verdi's La Forza del Destino, featuring a relatively obscure soprano, Gré Brouwenstijn. »
30 Mar 2008
With single CD versions of full-length operas, isn't the term "highlights" presumptuous? »
23 Mar 2008
UC Opera's reputation for showcasing rare large-scale works has been boosted this year with the UK premiere of this 1846 opera by Edouard Lalo after a Schiller play. »
17 Mar 2008
As Anna Russell might say: "The three operas of Puccini's 'Il Trittico' take place on a luxury cruise liner. . . . . On it." »
17 Mar 2008
Let me say up front that I like Jake Heggie's work. I feel he has a true gift for soaring and meaningful melody, a great ear for orchestral effects, a talent for picking good source material, and a knack for crafting affecting melodrama (in the best sense of that word) that can move an audience to tears. »
17 Mar 2008
Do dysfunctional families outnumber the ones that move through life untroubled, or is it — to paraphrase Tolstoy — that every dysfunctional family is dysfunctional in its own way and thus of greater interest to writers and composers? »
16 Mar 2008
I bet this doesn't happen at the movies: »
16 Mar 2008
Published in 2007, Riccardo primo, Re d’Inghilterra (HWV 23) and Tolomeo, Re d’Egitto (HWV 25) mark two of the latest installments of vocal-score editions of Handel’s operas based upon Bärenreiter’s Urtext editions. »
16 Mar 2008
Let us, for one example among many, take the capstan song in Act I. »
16 Mar 2008
This an intriguing two-disc DVD set. The primary disc is the opera itself, while the other disc is a film called “Adieu Mozart” that tells us about the unique relationship Mozart had with the City of Prague. »
16 Mar 2008
The Spanish comical lyric genre of the zarzuela has long been considered the stepchild of opera. »
16 Mar 2008
The BBC Proms webcasts all of its performances, and many are available for extended periods through BBC Radio's archives. »
16 Mar 2008
As evidence of Deutsche Grammophon's proud status as a classical record label of the "old school," there appears this CD document of a typical opera gala affair, from July of 2007 in Baden-Baden. »
16 Mar 2008
While a number of fine recordings of Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony have been released in recent years, the prospect of a performance conducted by Pierre Boulez is attractive for many reasons. »
03 Mar 2008
James Conlon has become the artistic heart and soul of Los Angeles Opera in his second season as music director. »
02 Mar 2008
The large number of recordings of Bach’s Mass in B minor predispose one to look for distinctions between them. »
02 Mar 2008
The Opera Company of Philadelphia’s February production is the second staging of David DiChiera’s new opera Cyrano, a co-production with Michigan Opera Theater and Florida Grand Opera. »
02 Mar 2008
Opera North is one of the most innovative opera companies in Britain. »
02 Mar 2008
It is a measure of the classic status that the music of Miles Davis has acquired in American culture that a single LP produced for Columbia in the 1960s (Miles Smiles) is the focus of a short monograph from Indiana University Press. »
02 Mar 2008
Perhaps the most beloved comic opera, Rossini’s Il barbière di Siviglia has never left the repertoire. »
02 Mar 2008
A typical film soundtrack today might not fill the length of a CD, while being padded with any pop music hits for which the producers would cough up the money for the rights. As often as not the scoring would... »
02 Mar 2008
The handsome face of tenor Juan Diego Florez naturally gets the cover of his latest CD, and his arguably unusually slim physique is on view too: on the inside cover of the booklet, on both the interior and rear of the jewel case, and on the back of the booklet. »
02 Mar 2008
San Diego Opera apparently has raided the vaults of Lincoln Center opera companies, circa the 1970s. »
25 Feb 2008
Many an anthology of Puccini's "greatest hits" has found its way to market, and many more will follow this latest from Decca, Puccini Gold. »
25 Feb 2008
The Royal Opera's new Salome is set roughly in the 1930s, in surroundings which refer overtly to Pasolini's Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, populated by uniformed soldiers and naked whores. »
22 Feb 2008
Dread and disgruntle are the emotions natural to the fan of any special singer when he arrives at the opera house to learn she has withdrawn from the performance and been replaced by an unknown. »
22 Feb 2008
With the tenth anniversary of her death approaching, Orfeo has released a double-CD box set tribute to Leonie Rysanek in their Wiener Staatsoper Live series. »
20 Feb 2008
ENO doesn’t really go in for bel canto opera. Other than a Maria Stuarda back in the mid 1990s, the only Donizetti opera in the company’s repertoire in the recent past has been the popular L’elisir d’amore. »
19 Feb 2008
In 1786, Habsburg Emperor Joseph II commissioned a pair of short operas from two of the biggest names in Viennese musical theater: Salieri and Mozart. »
18 Feb 2008
Jonas Kaufmann’s debut album is a treat to the ears of opera lovers. »
17 Feb 2008
Director Jonathan Miller was there at the curtain call to greet the first night of this latest revival of a production which has now been in ENO's repertoire for twenty years. »
17 Feb 2008
My Valentine’s Day gift came a bit early courtesy of Los Angeles Opera. Of course, it is to be hoped that your own celebration has a happier outcome than that of opera’s most famous Love Couple, “Tristan und Isolde.” »
17 Feb 2008
Valentine’s Day may not quite be in the same major holiday league with the Fourth of July or New Year’s Eve, but you wouldn’t have known it from the fireworks emanating from the stage of Portland Opera, in the form of some dazzling Valentine’s night vocalizing in quite a fine production of Handel’s “Rodelinda.” »
17 Feb 2008
A sound designer? Isn’t that merely a euphemistic upgrade of “sound engineer?” »
17 Feb 2008
An air of anticipation filled the Four Seasons Centre as the announcer walked across the stage to say that soprano Ester Sümegi was ill and would not be performing. »
17 Feb 2008
To open its 2008 season, San Diego Opera restored the production of Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser that Günther Schneider-Siemsson created for the Metropolitan Opera three decades ago. »
10 Feb 2008
Anthony Minghella's visually-arresting staging, a co-production with New York's Metropolitan Opera and the Lithuanian National Opera, returned this month to its original home at the London Coliseum after a gap of two years. »
10 Feb 2008
The Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, after suffering a calamitous fire in the early 1990s, reopened in 1999, lovingly restored. TDK has released a series of DVDs from the Liceu since that date, providing ample evidence of the world... »
06 Feb 2008
Premiered posthumously, the symphonic song-cycle Das Lied von der Erde by Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) remains one of his defining works because of its synthesis of song and symphony, two genres he pursued throughout his career. »
04 Feb 2008
While I eagerly seized upon an opportunity to hear Angelika Kirschlager live for the first time, having written in very recent weeks about not one but two of the star mezzo’s current CD releases, I ventured to Frankfurt’s Alte Oper feeling a little bit like her stalker. »
03 Feb 2008
When I worked in the Archives of the Met, I was custodian of several hundred costumes, many from the days when divas traveled with steamer trunks full of things run up just for them, by the finest designers, with the most glamorous materials, in the colors and styles that suited the ladies themselves. »
03 Feb 2008
In 1851 during his first season as music director in Düsseldorf, Robert Schumann presented a performance of Bach’s St. John Passion, and unsurprisingly adapted the score both to nineteenth-century taste and nineteenth-century practicalities. »
03 Feb 2008
The centrality of dance at the French court helped bring grace, order, and political allegory into the characteristic prominence they enjoyed during the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV; theatre presentations of all stripes were infused with choreographic diversions. »
03 Feb 2008
In tandem with the recently released set of Sir Simon Rattle’s recordings of Mahler’s symphonies on EMI Classics, the set of the complete symphonies by Jean Sibelius merits attention. »
03 Feb 2008
There is nothing redeeming about Sir John Falstaff, one of Shakespeare’s most lively comic characters and the subject of Verdi’s final opera, and yet, inexplicably, we love him. »
28 Jan 2008
What constitutes an “international opera star” these days, anyway? »
24 Jan 2008
As much as Richard Wagner espoused opera reform in his theoretical writings by bringing to his works for the stage a closer unity between music and text, his actual means of doing so at times involved the use of orchestral forces that sometimes overwhelmed the sung word. »
24 Jan 2008
The budget label Gala purveys live performances both historic and relatively recent; of the three discussed here, the La Scala Fedora dates back to 1931, while the Attila comes from a 1987 La Fenice performance. »
22 Jan 2008
National styles of music in the seventeenth century were often distinctive, and in the case of French and Italian music, famously so. »
21 Jan 2008
With its recent release of Mahler’s symphonies conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, EMI Classics makes available in a single place an outstanding contribution to the composer’s discography. »
21 Jan 2008
This DVD records and commemorates a 1981 production of Parsifal in its Bayreuth lair, and the singers of 1981 are as fine as recollection might paint them. »
20 Jan 2008
Once the custom of the world's opera houses was to translate great operas into the language of each respective country. »
20 Jan 2008
Repackaging older recordings having become the primary focus of a classical recording company's business, Deutsche Grammophon budgeted some funds for art direction for its budget series called "Opera House" (although that appellation only appears in a link found on the back inside cover of the sets' booklets). »
20 Jan 2008
Of Rosenkavaliers on DVD, the classics tend to be lovingly detailed productions, going back to the film of Herbert von Karajan leading an exemplary cast, with Elizabeth Schwarzkopf's iconic Marschallin. »
20 Jan 2008
The Metropolitan Opera audience loves its Wagner, and the management for the last several decades has, alas, made sure we aren’t spoiled: it’s a rare season that gets more than two production revivals of Wagner, and some years there have been none. »
20 Jan 2008
Despite an unsurprising degree of conservatism in liturgical music, devotional life in Rome often found ways of taking advantage of modern musical style. »
20 Jan 2008
With her performance of the “Four Last Songs,” ably partnered by Michael Tilson Thomas and his San Francisco Symphony, Deborah Voigt emphatically confirmed her place as one of the glories of the current roster of Strauss interpreters. »
20 Jan 2008
John Adams, whose opera Nixon in China set the bar for post-minimalism in the lyric theatre, has once again scored a success with his latest work. »
16 Jan 2008
“Her fioritura is priceless, breathtaking, and effortless.” »
16 Jan 2008
Wagner’s all-conquering chic made apocalyptic music-dramas drawn from folklore the ideal of the nationalistic era; every serious opera composer of the time felt obliged to attempt something in that line. »
13 Jan 2008
The English composer Nicholas Maw has been a major voice since the 1960's, with a wide range of works that include the 2002 opera, "Sophie’s Choice," a violin concerto for Joshua Bell (1993), and the monumentally-scaled orchestral work, "Odyssey" (1972-87). »
13 Jan 2008
As is often the case, last works that remain incomplete at the time of a composer’s death, are quick to invoke controversy and conspiracy theories. »
07 Jan 2008
This is a valuable new recording of a work that is only rarely heard, but was widely influential and wildly popular during the eighteenth century. Philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote both the libretto and the music, with mixed success. »
07 Jan 2008
This disc is well worth the price for the first track alone: the opening measures of Jean-Féry Rebel’s “Cahos,” (Chaos), written in 1737 or 1738, may cause you to wonder if you accidentally left a Stockhausen or Ligeti disc in the changer. »
03 Jan 2008
In this country art and politics are rarely bedfellows — strange or otherwise; indeed, it’s seldom that the two meet under the same roof. »
30 Dec 2007
Regarded, until the modern vogue for earlier masters, as the senior surviving grand master of opera, Gluck never quite becomes fashionable and never quite vanishes. »
30 Dec 2007
There is no middle ground in War and Peace — or, rather, it’s all middle ground, like a battlefield, and you may feel as if every soldier in Russia (and in France) has marched over you. »
30 Dec 2007
Once upon a time, we used to only dream about a stellar pairing like Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu has fielded for their current offering on display: “La Cenerentola.” »
30 Dec 2007
Enough ink was spilled last year gushing over Valencia’s new Calatrava-designed opera house and Arts and Science park that I had been chomping at the bit for the opportunity to take in a performance there as soon as my availability and, more important, the availability of a still-very-hard-to-find ticket coincided. »
30 Dec 2007
Do we too easily take Richard Strauss for granted? The question is prompted by the superlative production of “Frau ohne Schatten” that was the highlight of the fall season at the Chicago Lyric Opera. »
30 Dec 2007
This recording made half a century ago will not be anyone’s first choice unless one is a die-hard fan of one of the principal singers; neither of them belonging to the absolute top in their profession. »
27 Dec 2007
The glorious universe of the Baroque has been receiving tribute from the wonderful talent of countertenor and early music guru René Jacobs for more than thirty years now. »
27 Dec 2007
Although considered among Ravel’s finest works, Daphnis et Chloé may be known best through excerpts, particularly the second suite that the composer derived from his score. »
27 Dec 2007
There’s still a hint of jest in the comparison, but it’s not without reason that Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally are mentioned now and then in opera circles as “the Strauss and Hofmannsthal of the 21st century.” »
27 Dec 2007
Watching The Queen of Spades staged by a Russian company is often an unforgettable experience. »
26 Dec 2007
A 1979 recording originally released on LP in 1985, the CD reissue of this classic performance of Schoenberg’s 1913 cantata Gurrelieder as part of its series entitled Originals makes this fine account of this magnificent work available to another generation of listeners. »
18 Dec 2007
If Belfast in Northern Ireland isn’t a city that immediately springs to mind as a centre of musical excellence then it’s not for want of talent, initiative and professionalism within its cultural community. »
16 Dec 2007
After the triumph of his fifth opera, Ernani, Verdi could have gone on writing howling melodramas and made a mint. »
14 Dec 2007
You will wonder what designer Rosalie could have been thinking when she put Brunnhilde in trousers twice as wide at the waist as the soprano wearing them, with a nippled plastic bustier above. »
11 Dec 2007
Not long ago, English National Opera declared an intention to capitalise on its name and history by placing greater emphasis on English works. »
11 Dec 2007
Despite 19th-century Russia’s reputation as an Italian opera haven, Verdi’s late masterpiece Otello found acceptance there only with great difficulty, even though in its 1889 premiere the title role acquired a great local interpreter in the Mariinsky Theater primo uomo, Nikolai Figner. »
04 Dec 2007
Imagine a mild December night, with some three hundred people queueing for a concert ticket on Siena’s horseshoe-shaped Piazza del Campo. »
04 Dec 2007
Johanna Kinkel (1810-1858) was a talented contemporary of Fanny Hensel, and other fine musicians of the first half of the nineteenth century. Her legacy includes some fine Lieder, which are collected as An Imaginary Voyage through Europe in an arrangement that represents the various themes she explored in her music. »
04 Dec 2007
Peter Schickele, channeling P.D.Q. Bach, was wont to say, “Most classical scholars were
unaware Iphigenia was ever in Brooklyn … and I think the cantata, Iphigenia in Brooklyn, does for Iphigenia what the Vinland Map did for Leif Ericsson.” »
04 Dec 2007
The American Dream and the tragic vision of ancient Greece are miles and millennia apart; yet they merge seamlessly in William Bolcom’s “View from the Bridge,” on stage in November at the Washington National Opera. »
04 Dec 2007
Die Frau ohne Schatten is the story of a being of purely sensual spirit who defies the temptation to do evil, thereby demonstrating a moral soul and achieving humanity. »
28 Nov 2007
The little heard “Adelia, o la figlia dell’arciere” (Adelia, or the Archer’s Daughter) stands between Donizetti’s Parisian successes “La fille du regiment” and “La favorite” in the prolific composer’s oeuvre. »
28 Nov 2007
San Francisco Opera makes it possible for opera-lovers who have stuffed themselves with turkey on the fourth Thursday of November to indulge in a feast of opera on the following three days. »
27 Nov 2007
Although few composers have been so closely associated with a single work, Johann Pachelbel, whose canon for three violins has achieved canonical ubiquity, was a prolific composer with a number of vocal works to his credit. »
19 Nov 2007
Part of the fun of visiting the many companies that specialize in unearthing forgotten operas lies precisely in not knowing what you’re going to get. »
19 Nov 2007
The bel canto era, insofar as the contemporary public considers it at all, is usually thought of as the golden age of vocal beauty for its own sake. »
19 Nov 2007
Mozart made it easy for the Philistines. They see Don Giovanni thrown into the flaming jaws of Hell and hiss: “Two thousand women seduced and abandoned! “ »
18 Nov 2007
Released as part of Orfeo’s series entitled Festspiel Dokumente, this recording makes available on CD the concert performance at the Salzburg Festival of Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony by the Vienna Philharmonic that Hans Knappertsbusch conducted on 30 August 1949. »
18 Nov 2007
The first opera performance I consciously attended while being definitely hooked to the genre due to records, was Guillaume Tell more than 40 years ago. »
18 Nov 2007
Released in celebration of the recent Mozart year, Tutto Mozart! is a collection of nineteen arias, duets and other ensembles from the composer’s operas that feature the baritone Bryn Terfel. »
18 Nov 2007
Founded in Oxford in the early 1990’s, the ensemble Charivari Agréable looks to seventeenth-century composers with Oxford connections as the basis for their recent recording, “The Oxford Psalms.” »
18 Nov 2007
The Badisches Staatstheater seems to have borrowed with a vengeance the catch-phrase from John Waters’ recent “A Dirty Shame,” namely: “Let’s go sexin’!” I can’t recall ever seeing a “Don Giovanni”
with more lip-locks, grinding torsos, leg-wraps, and groping embraces. »
16 Nov 2007
Edita Gruberova’s North American fans, who can only hold onto dim hopes that someday the
European superstar will return to these shores, can always seek to sate their desire for her artistry by picking up the latest CD from Nightingale Classics. »
14 Nov 2007
"They are boys, and they sing, but don't call them choirboys. 'Libera' prefer to be called a vocal group — a real boy band, if you like." »
14 Nov 2007
Between the efforts of recording companies Naxos and Opera Rara, Rossini-philes have been living in a golden age. »
14 Nov 2007
Philips decided some time ago that it no longer needed to be the audio representative for two fine contemporary singers of Russian origin, mezzo Olga Borodina and baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky. »
14 Nov 2007
After the marketing gimmickry of Sally Potter’s production of Carmen, and a dance-based Poppea set at the bottom of the sea, it did not bode well when the advertising for ENO’s latest
production included an interactive dress-up doll circulated by email. »
14 Nov 2007
Attending the opera may not be the first thing you think of when visiting Istanbul, but opera is to be found (if less well advertised than the local Bach Festival) at the Ataturk Cultural Center on Taksim Square, the heart of modern Istanbul. »
14 Nov 2007
Welsh National Opera’s new opera “The Sacrifice”, composed by James MacMillan with libretto by Michael Symmons Roberts, and directed by Katie Mitchell, is an emotionally raw and compelling study of the nature of conflict, and how humans are changed by it. »
13 Nov 2007
Verdi, a born skeptic where the supernatural is concerned, did not seem to know quite what to do with the witches in Macbeth and was far too loyal to Shakespeare to reduce their role – he knew how closely the play was bound to them, famous for them. »
12 Nov 2007
Le Nozze di Figaro, in 1786, was the longest and most elaborate opera buffa ever composed and (though it is seldom given complete) is still the longest you are likely to see in the regular repertory. »
12 Nov 2007
As its name suggests, the selections on this wonderful new CD are all excerpted from five different versions of the tale of the beautiful enchantress “Armida.” »
11 Nov 2007
Recorded on 29 January 1978, this performance preserves a classic production of Beethoven’s Fidelio, which involved a gifted cast. »
11 Nov 2007
Although seriously ill, Beverly Sills and Luciano Pavarotti were still very much alive when general director Anthony Freud in his second year in this position planned the 53rd season of the Houston Grand Opera. »
11 Nov 2007
Since his appointment as general manager of Parma’s Teatro Regio in August 2005, Mauro Meli didn’t conceal his ambitious plans for growth. »
11 Nov 2007
A notice for organizers: it’s relatively easy to produce a vocal recital and sell out a large house
for two nights in a row. »
11 Nov 2007
It’s somewhat of a mystery why Puccini’s 1917 “La Rondine” is such a neglected, rarely-performed opera. »
31 Oct 2007
This book is in German, which may make it of limited interest to people who are not sufficiently familiar with the language. »
31 Oct 2007
The 17th Bienal of Contemporary Brazilian Music [XVII Bienal de Música Brasileira Contemporânea] began on Sunday, Oct. 21, 2007 at the Sala Cecilia Meireles, Rio's leading concert hall, with a lengthy program divided between six orchestral works, entrusted to the National Symphony Orchestra of the Universidade Federal Fluminense, based in Niteroi, RJ and three works for percussion, interpreted by the Dynamo Percussion Quartet. »
30 Oct 2007
When performances remain in the aural memory of the audience long after the final wave of applause, the event merits attention. »
30 Oct 2007
I recently made a special trip to Hamburg with one real goal in mind: to hear one of my most favorite young singers, bass Kyle Ketelsen in the Staatsoper’s new production of “Tales of Hoffmann.” »
29 Oct 2007
The two short films about the composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), The Early Years and Maturity & Silence comprise a video biography of Finnish artist. »
28 Oct 2007
For the final HD moviecast of the 2007-08 season, the Metropolitan Opera will present two stars in a production that has already earned rave reviews at Covent Garden: Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Florez starring in Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment. »
28 Oct 2007
Despite rumours to the contrary, English National Opera’s advertising material claims that this 12th revival of Nicholas Hytner’s popular production of ‘ The Magic Flute’ will be the last. Though it’s arguably better to get rid of a production in... »
28 Oct 2007
Someone once called Handel’s Italian cantata Apollo e Dafne a “proto-opera” and it’s easy to see why. »
28 Oct 2007
Among the signal operas of the twentieth century, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1934) by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) is a powerful transformation of Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth, based on the 1865 short story by Nicolai Leskov. »
28 Oct 2007
For some seasons now, ENO has expressed a commitment to reinforce the role of dance within opera. »
24 Oct 2007
Do you remember a moment when a piece, new to you, so engaged you that you immediately wanted to know more. . .or all about it? »
24 Oct 2007
I doubt many admirers of Leontyne Price will be tempted to buy this issue. »
22 Oct 2007
Birgit Nilsson probably never heard of “the Protestant work ethic,” but she didn’t need to know it. »
22 Oct 2007
The Roman composer Mazzocchi is one of those figures known only to musicologists, and it is a pity, for this disc contains first-rate music. »
22 Oct 2007
An expedition against the famed warring women, the Amazons, ranking as Hercules’ ninth labor out the canonic twelve, provided the subject for the libretto by Antonio Salvi (not Giacomo Francesco Bussani, as hitherto misattributed) that Vivaldi set to music in 1723 as his own sixteenth operatic labor. »
22 Oct 2007
Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s guest appearance is an annual fixture at the Proms, and this year the work of choice was Verdi’s Macbeth, in a semi-staged performance on July 24th based on Richard Jones’s new production for this year’s Festival. »
16 Oct 2007
At this point in his career David Gockley has no need to prove himself. He did that with awesome success as general director of Houston Grand Opera for 33 years, during which he made that company a front runner both on the American and international opera scenes. »
16 Oct 2007
Mirella Freni’s 1993 triumph in the lead of Umberto Giordani’s Fedora at La Scala has made it to DVD. In his booklet essay, Werner Pfister (translated by Stewart Spencer) admits the opera “does not enjoy the best of reputations.” »
16 Oct 2007
Okay, okay, I freely admit this up front: I am not inordinately fond of operetta. Just thought you should know. All the more remarkable then that I found myself listening to this new recording several times over. »
15 Oct 2007
Whatever you do, don't give this DVD as a gift to people you don't want to alienate. »
15 Oct 2007
SAN FRANCISCO — “My subject is war and the pity of war, and the poetry is in the pity.” »
15 Oct 2007
A remarkably quick turnaround from only last May when the first run of Handel’s “Radamisto” was blessed with a consistently high level of vocal performance may have been the reason for sparser houses this time round at the Hamburg Staatsoper (October 6th). »
09 Oct 2007
Of Donizetti’s fifty or so “serious” operas, Lucia di Lammermoor was the only one to survive his heyday almost unscathed by change of fashion; today, when a dozen of his other worthy works have been restored to the repertory, Lucia easily hangs on. »
09 Oct 2007
Recorded in August 2001 at the Salzburg Festival, less than a month before the tragic events of 11 September, the presentation of songs and readings of music by American composers and texts by American authors seems aimed at a different world. Without venturing into political or social dimensions of the event, the concept of America in August 2001 suggested at times a sense of being impermeable, if not invincible. »
09 Oct 2007
Thomas Stoltzer represents German composition in the wake of the Reformation yet still immersed in the contrapuntal richness of the Josquin tradition. »
09 Oct 2007
With its fine engineering, the rich score of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony and the superb playing of the Philadelpha Orchestra conducted by Christoph Eschenbach emerge well in this recently released recording. »
09 Oct 2007
This must be one of the most interesting collectors’ collections to have appeared in many a year. Personally I’ve always liked any singer from Fernando De Lucia to Rolando Villazon but I never was tempted to collect shellac and therefore didn’t have to contact Yves Becko. »
08 Oct 2007
René Jacobs’s beautiful 1996 production of Francesco Cavalli’s Calisto has garnered many enthusiastic fans over the years. »
04 Oct 2007
Once upon a time, there was something known as early music. This was not so much a repertoire, a musico-historical epoch, as an attitude, a counter-cultural group. »
02 Oct 2007
There is a certain onerous responsibility in developing a new production of Carmen at a major house. »
01 Oct 2007
Across the country from Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Opera has opened its 2007-08 season with big stars (Netrebko, Alagna, Dessay, Giordani) in juicy, melodic operas by Donizetti and Gounod. »
28 Sep 2007
This is a recording that glories in iconicity. »
28 Sep 2007
Masterpiece? The term rather depends on whether the artist in question was indeed a master and it might come as a surprise to learn that this little-known composer of the brief, but significant, German Baroque Opera period is regarded by many as just that. »
26 Sep 2007
The New York City Opera’s production of Richard Danielpour’s and Toni Morrison’s opera, Margaret Garner, boldly faces the ugly history of slavery in the United States, and the racism inherent in the institution of opera. »
23 Sep 2007
There are a number of signs of the popularity of the King’s Singers—their longevity as an ensemble, the huge success of their public concerts, and their sizable discography all come immediately to mind. »
23 Sep 2007
Westminster Abbey is surely many things to many people. »
23 Sep 2007
The 2004 DVD "Playing Elizabeth’s Tune," originating in a BBC television production, features concert performances of Byrd’s sacred music sung by the Tallis Scholars along with documentary material treating the composer and his time. »
23 Sep 2007
It is not surprising that it was Beethoven’s Fidelio that was chosen to reconsecrate rebuilt opera houses in Vienna and Berlin in the years after World War Two. »
23 Sep 2007
If the swift downpour that hit Pesaro, moments before the Prima of G. Rossini’s Otello on August 8th, seemed like a bad omen, that was nothing compared to the two major cast changes that could have weakened the foundation of the Rossini Opera Festival’s new production of the opera and washed it away. »
23 Sep 2007
Of the operas composed in the latter half of the twentieth century, Krzysztof Penderecki’s Die Teufel von Loudon is a significant contribution to the repertoire. »
19 Sep 2007
For those who can’t (or won’t) see the forest of an opera for the trees of performance minutiae, here’s the word about the San Francisco Opera’s new production of Wagner’s “Tannhauser” that opened tonight: »
19 Sep 2007
The liturgy of Compline marks the end of the monastic day, as the community seeks peaceful repose for the night ahead. »
19 Sep 2007
Psalmody, be it in the form of chanted recitations or anthem settings, lies close to the heart of liturgical singing, and this collection, “Psalms for the Spirit” brings together an engaging variety of both long familiar and recent psalms that celebrates the traditions and explores new directions. »
19 Sep 2007
What’s outstanding about this Lohengrin is the orchestral playing. »
18 Sep 2007
Name this stage piece if you can: »
18 Sep 2007
Before the age of computers, CDs. DVDs and Apple i-Phones, there was television. »
18 Sep 2007
Los Angeles Opera opened its 2007 season with Fidelio on September 8th, and on the following day held a gala performance of Verdi’s Requiem. »
16 Sep 2007
One of the glories of a well-executed performance of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle is the sonic dimension of the work, with the dramatic contrasts between the larger musical canvasses and the more intimate ensembles that occur between several voices and within the orchestra itself. »
16 Sep 2007
Often overshadowed by its composer's Requiem, the Te Deum, Op. 22 (1849) by Hector Berlioz deserves attention for its own merits, and this recent release by Hänssler in its series of live recordings of the Staatskapelle Dresden is a solid reading of this work. »
16 Sep 2007
The courtly instrumental music of the Halle composer, Samuel Scheidt, is preserved in the printed collection "Ludi musici" (1620), giving congenial suggestion of both the richness of the court practice and the virtuosic abilities of the ensemble players there, including the cornettist, Zacharias Härtel. »
16 Sep 2007
The quarter century of work by the French medieval ensemble, Ensemble Organum, and their director, Marcel Pérès has positioned them as leading interpreters of early liturgical repertories; among interpreters, their renditions assert a high degree of distinctiveness and character. »
12 Sep 2007
On stages all over the world, most any night of the year, poor Parisian Mimi hacks her way into oblivion, while her sometime lover cries out her name in hysterical despair. »
11 Sep 2007
In 2005 the Australian musicologist Janice Stockigt made the case that several works attributed to Baldassare Galuppi in the Saxon State and University Library (Dresden) were really the works of Antonio Vivaldi. »
10 Sep 2007
This installment in the ongoing series of Monteverdi madrigal recordings from Marco Longhini and Naxos presents distinctive performances of works that lie close to the heart of the early baroque style. »
10 Sep 2007
There is much to admire in Masaaki Suzuki’s Bach performances with the Bach Collegium Japan, and this recording of excerpts from the St. Matthew Passion will remind the listener of the diverse ways in which this is so. »
07 Sep 2007
As an audio-recording, Supraphon's set of Bedrich Smetana's The Bartered Bride conducted by Zdeněk Košler deserves the highest recommendation. »
07 Sep 2007
A series of historic recordings comes from Profil/Edition: Günter Hänssler, and from those a subset of Staatskapelle Dresden performances brings opera fans a remarkable document. »
07 Sep 2007
Here's another in a series of televised recitals from Lugano, Switzerland to have appeared on DVD. »
07 Sep 2007
Alban Berg's Wozzeck takes almost two hours to induce a sense of soul-crushing nausea and despondency. Kiri Sings Karl achieved that for your reviewer in a couple minutes, and then went on with terrifying, torturous efficiency for almost another hour. »
07 Sep 2007
Director Willy Decker's outstanding Traviata from Salzburg, with Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon, is one of the great contemporary opera DVDs. »
07 Sep 2007
A husky baritone in Speedos on a motor scooter and a buxom, purple-wigged Dame Edna drag clone — the Aspen Opera Theater Company’s staging of Francesco Cavalli’s 1667 “Eliogabalo” was off to a start that promised to equal the program’s over-the-top staging of the composer’s 1649 “Giasone” two summers ago. (AOTC director Edward Berkeley raised the curtain on that Baroque potboiler to a biker Amor on a Harley.) »
06 Sep 2007
Among the available videos of Richard Strauss’s Elektra, the recently released DVD of the live broadcast from 16 February 1980 stands out for capturing the exciting of an all-star international cast that included the famous Birgit Nilsson in the title role. »
05 Sep 2007
The unmistakable fanfare that opens Monteverdi’s seminal L’Orfeo rang out from the top of the crowded foyer of the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam last Friday night to signal not only the start of the opera, but also the opening night of their celebratory 2007 Monteverdi Cycle. »
02 Sep 2007
In the long ago, when the best source of music reproduction in the home was a handsome piece of furniture, fitted with hidden audio components, and usually called radio-phonographs, my family had one — from Avery Fisher I believe — that had among its controls a switch labeled ‘presence.’ »
28 Aug 2007
A career-making smash for Donizetti at its 1830 premiere, Anna Bolena eventually faded from the standard repertory. »
28 Aug 2007
Recorded live at the Stiftsbasilika, St. Florian (Austrian) on 12 and 13 September 2006, this DVD offers a special performance of the famous Cleveland Orchestra outside its home at Severance Hall. »
28 Aug 2007
Among the available DVDs of Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck, the recent release of the production Rolf Liebermann made into a film i the late 1960s stands out for various reasons. »
28 Aug 2007
Written in 1900, Elgar’s Gerontius expresses the universal and existentialist struggle of death and rebirth. The allegorical significance of the piece touches on a need for faith, self-discovery, and acceptance of the world around us. »
28 Aug 2007
Opera singers today have become almost as famous and publicly worshipped as movie-stars; yet this has always been the case in operatic history. »
27 Aug 2007
CENTRAL CITY, Colo. — A year ago, when the Central City Opera announced plans to conclude its 2007 75th anniversary season with Gian Carlo Menotti’s “Saint of Bleecker Street,” the composer was aged but alive. »
27 Aug 2007
It’s clear today that China’s Cultural Revolution has led to a cultural revolution that — in music at least — has made the country’s artists frontrunners on the international scene. »
27 Aug 2007
Glimmerglass Opera is in a watershed year. With the departure of Paul Kellogg, who had considerable success developing that annual festival, General and Artistic Director Michael Macleod has chosen to begin his tenure with a variation on the usual four-opera-season, namely a thematic collection
of pieces based on the “Orpheus” legend. “Don’t look
back” is the marketing catch phrase. »
27 Aug 2007
In an evening brimming with sublime performances, Anja Siljja took grasp of her dramatic prowess and left us breathless, yearning for more. At the most sacred opera house in Italy, and perhaps the world, Janáček’s opera was thrillingly presented and is an example of our beloved genre at its finest. »
27 Aug 2007
Carlos Cogul is a London vocal coach and an appreciated baritone giving many a recital ……in the London Tube while commuters hastily pass by to catch their trains. Judging from the photo on this CD he is not a young man any more. »
27 Aug 2007
The choice between this recording made at the Pesaro Festival in August 2005 and the Opera Rara recording of 2000 will partly be made for non-musical reasons. »
27 Aug 2007
Almost thirty years ago a century old tradition ended with the last performance of I Maestri Cantatori. »
20 Aug 2007
“Who in the world am I?” proclaimed the posters all over Munich, reducing Lewis Carroll’s famous conundrum to a sound-bite. »
16 Aug 2007
If you are in need of a Romantic, Alt-Nuernberg, Beloved-Old-Vaterland-As-It-(Never)-Was sort of production of “Die Meistersinger,” you would probably do well to wait for the Met revival, and stay far far away (actually, add another “far” to that) from the Bayreuth Festpiel’s latest “Skandal”-ripe interpretation. »
16 Aug 2007
For twenty-eight years now the Ohio Light Opera Festival (OLO) has held forth in Wooster in the summertime, presenting no less than 99 different works (their big 100th comes next year), familiar and forgotten, by the likes of Gilbert and Sullivan, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Offenbach, Sigmund Romberg, Carl Zeller and Emmerich Kálmán — to refer only to the authors of the seven undertaken this year. »
16 Aug 2007
“Tea: Mirror of the Soul” with book by Xu Ying and music by Tan Dun, revised from an earlier version first produced in Japan in 2002, was to have been the novelty of the present Santa Fe Opera season. Instead, it was dead on arrival. »
16 Aug 2007
On a cold winter’s day in Vienna, just before Christmas 1790, Mr. Haydn dined with Mr. Mozart for the last time. »
16 Aug 2007
The legend of Orpheus and Eurydice has come down through the centuries to us, on the way inspiring some sixty-four other known operas. »
16 Aug 2007
The first masterpiece in the history of opera. That’s a tall order to live up to for any company and for any band of singers, especially those at the beginning of their careers. »
16 Aug 2007
Over the past decade, there have been a plethora of works trying to identify the historical models for characters in Puccini’s famous opera Madama Butterfly. »
13 Aug 2007
W. A. Mozart’s Così fan tutte, heard on a stormy night July 11, proved a sorry exercise in deconstruction, something I never expected to endure at Santa Fe Opera. »
12 Aug 2007
Staatsoper Stuttgart presented its new production of The Girl of the Golden West, directed by Calixto Bieito. And, well, it began with an added dialogue scene to establish the “concept.” »
07 Jul 2007
In 2003, at Cagli’s Accademia del Teatro, Elisabetta Courir directed a compelling Così fan tutte, minimalist, sophisticated and low-budget; quite unlike Daniele Abbado, whose Lohengrin for Bologna’s Teatro Comunale integrated “hard” scenery, video projections and historically informed costumes into a dream-like pageant. »
04 Jul 2007
An ingenious and handsome staging, in the proper period and full of delicious color, fashion and furnishings, a production that honors the compatibility of tradition with good fun, and four singers who look their parts, play the farce, and are as easy on the ears as on the eyes — what more could you want from a Don Pasquale? »
04 Jul 2007
The Polish composer Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) is one of more engaging composers of the early twentieth century. »
04 Jul 2007
When hearing the final work of a composer whose life was cut short, one can not help but wonder, “What if?” »
27 Jun 2007
Established in 1985 by the United Nations, the World Philharmonic Orchestra gave its inaugural concert on 12 December 1985 under the auspices of UNICEF and the Konserthus, Sweden. »
27 Jun 2007
La Scala di Seta, composed in Venice in 1812 (Rossini was 20; Tancredi and fame were a year off; Barbiere and immortality were four years down the road), shares the fortune of La Gazza Ladra: that is, until recently, the public knew the overture quite well but nothing else from the opera which, indeed, lacks the spectacular arias and hilarious ensembles that might have kept it on the boards. »
25 Jun 2007
Produced by Rolf Lieberman and directed for television by Joachim Hess, this 1968 studio recording of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz has much to recommend as a traditional production of the opera. »
25 Jun 2007
Just whose opera is “Der Rosenkavalier” anyway? The title — to begin with the obvious — says it’s youthful Octavian, pinpointing his role as the bearer of the rose that is to seal the marriage contract of Ochs and child-like Sophie. »
24 Jun 2007
Il Viaggio a Reims was a pièce d’occasion, part of the official tributes to Charles X of France on his coronation in 1825, but unlike most such creations – which tend to dreary platitudes of the Oscar speech variety – Viaggio has a cheeky personality and delicious music from Rossini at the top of his game, music he planned to recycle in subsequent operas – which he did. »
24 Jun 2007
As indicated in the copy on the CD, itself this is indeed a “unique collection of mostly short works” by Igor Stravinsky. »
24 Jun 2007
In charting the history of music in the West, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Paris loom large as a golden age of innovative polyphony, a golden age that is much the fruits of two composers, Leoninus and Perotinus. »
22 Jun 2007
This live concert recording assembles a trio of late eighteenth-century Viennese composers; the program is strong in evocation of time and place, but admittedly less so in substance. »
21 Jun 2007
There’s not much point in presenting Lully’s Psyché (in its North American premiere no less) unless you’re going to give it something vaguely like the grandeur Louis XIV could command in 1678. »
19 Jun 2007
An increasing lack of substance and imagination behind ENO’s season scheduling means that a revival of a theatrically impressive recent production of a repertoire piece is to be welcomed, especially when that production comes with a cast of superior calibre. »
18 Jun 2007
When opera is the subject, there’s an uneasy embarrassment at Leipzig’s annual 10-day Bach Festival, for opera is a genre that the city’s most famous musical son never embraced. »
17 Jun 2007
Two productions of Death in Venice within a month : one high budget and glamorous at the ENO and the other at Aldeburgh with a much more humble pedigree. »
17 Jun 2007
Among Lasso’s vast output there are few works more imposing than his collected settings of the seven penitential psalms. »
17 Jun 2007
Franz Waxman was working with librettist James Forsyth on an opera, Dr. Jekyll, when the composer’s wife died. »
17 Jun 2007
Mahler: Urlicht is a recording of selected songs for voice and piano from various collections of
the composer’s Lieder, including his early settings from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the later Wunderhorn Lieder that Mahler set in the 1890s in versions with both orchestral and keyboard accompaniment, and also his Rűckert-Lieder, performed by the young mezzo soprano Christianne Stotijn accompanied by Julius Drake. »
11 Jun 2007
In 2001 the recording company Naïve and the Istituto per beni musicali in Piemonte began a large-scale undertaking of recording the vast holdings of Vivaldi’s musical library. »
11 Jun 2007
Vicenza’s Teatro Olimpico, a jewel of Renaissance architecture inaugurated in 1585 and seating around 500, hosted in early June a run of three performances of Rossini’s Italiana in Algeri. »
05 Jun 2007
The June 2 world premiere of “Frau Margot” at the Fort Worth Opera might be regarded as “an historic return,” for this is Thomas Pasitieri’s first opera in 18 years. »
05 Jun 2007
Doktor Faust eclipses most of Ferrucio’s Busoni’s other work in terms of popularity. Surprisingly, though, he wrote little song. Only 40 pieces remain, many written in his youth. »
04 Jun 2007
“We’ll discuss the greatest tenor in history, Jussi Björling, and his astounding voice.” »
04 Jun 2007
I was never much impressed by the Russian performances of this most famous of Rubinstein’s
many operas. »
04 Jun 2007
In Verdi’s beloved opera, love does not conquer all but the sweet-taste of what “might have been” lingers on our lips forever when we think of the beautiful Violetta. »
03 Jun 2007
Arizona Opera ended its 2006/07 season with a tightly-knit, well-tuned presentation of Carlisle Floyd's Susannah, his best known opera that has enjoyed numerous productions since its New York City Opera debut in 1956. »
31 May 2007
Naxos’s DVD venture has produced a fascinating document, the original documentary shorts The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River, filmed by Pare Lorentz, with the Virgil Thomson scores re-recorded by the post-Classical Ensemble, led by Angel Gil-Ordóñez. »
31 May 2007
Given the fine recent recordings of Mahler’s Second Symphony on both CD and DVD, the release of Pierre Boulez’s performances from 26 and 27 March 2005 at the Philharmonie, Berlin, is a further contribution to the interpretations of this important work. »
31 May 2007
Deborah Warner’s new production of Death in Venice is ravishingly beautiful, with stunning lighting designs by Jean Kalman who manages to capture the spirit of every facet of Venice and of the drama’s more general themes, from the misty eeriness of Aschenbach’s first gondola ride through to ominous darkening skies and blazing sunsets. »
30 May 2007
Serpents, abduction, magic flutes, a sacred priesthood and, of course….love, are a few of the elements Mozart used to comprise his mason-influenced collaboration with Emanuel von Schikaneder. »
30 May 2007
Just as sausage can be best enjoyed without any extensive knowledge of its preparation and
contents, one should slide slowly into the luxuriant bath that is Massenet’s Esclarmonde and leave the libretto far to the side. »
30 May 2007
Released in early 2007, Marin Alsop’s performance of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana is an exciting, new recording of this familiar and durable scenic cantata, based on medieval lyrics in Latin and German. »
30 May 2007
Verboten und verbannt — forbidden and banned — a phrase used with Jewish composers whose music was proscribed by the Nazis brings to mind more than musical censorship, but also the atrocities that culminated in the Holocaust. »
30 May 2007
Curmudgeons and aesthetes may have to fight their gag reflex to enjoy some luscious music-making on the latest disc, Angel Dances, from that hot studio band, The Twelve Berlin Philharmonic Cellists. »
29 May 2007
The interpretive reception of medieval music begins, as John Haines lays forth in the present investigation, already during the latter period of the Middle Ages. »
29 May 2007
Towards the end of his life Britten became interested in the idea of developing the opera experience beyond the technical confines of the stage. He would have, I think, loved this film because it’s so intelligently sensitive to his fundamental ideas. It is, no less, a work of art built around a work of art. »
25 May 2007
Norfork - It’s America’s biggest birthday since the 1976 bicentennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence: »
20 May 2007
This recording is a souvenir in more than one sense. »
20 May 2007
Chief attraction of the Paris Opera’s new production of Simon Boccanegra was Dmitri Hvorostovsky in the title role. »
20 May 2007
The quality packaging of Anonymous 4’s latest recording indicates the group’s importance to their label, Harmonia Mundi. »
09 May 2007
In the countless performances of Leoncavallo’s masterpiece Pagliacci since its 1892 premiere, there must have been times when the light tenor singing Beppe watched the other tenor, of heavier voice, in the lead role of Canio and wondered if someday he (the Beppe) would take on the dramatic role of the homicidal clown. »
09 May 2007
Audrey Stottler’s Wagner recital provides ample evidence of a voice with the range and heft for
the challenging roles of Brünnhilde and Isolde, as well as Sieglinde, a role often sung by a vocalist with less firepower. »
09 May 2007
Dare one assume that with this disc, Alison Balsom becomes the first artist to bring her lung power to both Norma’s “Casta Diva” and Die Zauberflöte’s “Der hölle rache” in the same recital? »
09 May 2007
Premiered at Washington National Opera, director Francesca Zambello’s Porgy and Bess arrived in Los Angeles May 4th, for a run of 12 performances in just 17 days. »
09 May 2007
In a season that will conclude with a new production of Kismet, ENO has once again
come under criticism for the number of non-operatic works on the bill. »
03 May 2007
I often wonder who decides what records will be used to produce historical vocal issues. »
03 May 2007
For those who didn’t long ago purchased or exchanged this Salzburg recital via the pirate
connections, this is a fine opportunity to get maybe the best testimonial of this artist. »
03 May 2007
The commitment of Naxos to American music is substantial and admirable. »
02 May 2007
Filmed for television in 1971, this performance of the German translation of Orphée aux enfers (1858) as Orpheus in der Unterwelt breaks the conventional wisdom that some espouse about the weaknesses of opera or opera when conceived for the small screen. »
02 May 2007
Among the virtues of hearing Bach cantatas performed in liturgical order—one of the hallmarks
of John Eliot Gardiner’s stunning Cantata Pilgrimage of 2000—is the chance to savor Bach’s range of approach to unified text themes. »
02 May 2007
Who says an organ recital cannot be jolly good fun? »
01 May 2007
Dynamic brought its cameras to the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, Italy, in August 2005 to
record Bianca e Falliero, one of Rossini's so-called “serious” operas, and one that had only been rescued from many decades of neglect by the festival itself, in 1986. »
01 May 2007
Colin Graham’s dream of an opera based on Tolstoi’s “Anna Karenina” extends far into the past. »
01 May 2007
At Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu, a sold-out house marked, for two nights in a row, the
weekend introducing la diada de Sant Jordi, the big fiesta celebrated on April 23 in honor of the city’s patron St George. »
01 May 2007
The Los Angeles Philharmonic in April and May brought back its Tristan Project for the benefit of audiences in California and New York City. »
25 Apr 2007
Over a century after its premiere, Mahler's Second Symphony continues to be a compelling work and is as relevant now as it was when the work was conceived. »
25 Apr 2007
More than ever, compilations of previously released material fill the shelves of those stores still
selling classical music. »
25 Apr 2007
Once again, George Frederick Handel’s old stamping ground of St. George’s Hanover Square, London, resounded last night to the sound of his music as aspiring young singers from all over
the world fought out the Final of the London Handel Singing Competition. »
23 Apr 2007
“What drives a man to insanity and murder?” asks the poster for San Diego Opera’s new production of Wozzeck, which closed this Sunday after a run of four performances. »
22 Apr 2007
Philip Glass’s 1980 work, new to the London stage, gives an illustrated account of Mahatma
Gandhi’s early years in South Africa, viewed through the eyes of his satyagraha philosophy of peaceful resistance. »
19 Apr 2007
Krzyzstof Penderecki (b. 1933) has contributed a body of works to the modern repertoire, and his Symphony no. 7, which he composed 1996 (premiere 1997 in Jerusalem), is an impressive composition. »
16 Apr 2007
The orchestral songs of Gustav Mahler remain an important contribution to the genre, and stand
well alongside similar works by Berlioz, Wolf, and Strauss. »
16 Apr 2007
The New York City Opera continued its tradition of championing works that are less frequently
performed with this season’s production of La Donna del Lago. »
15 Apr 2007
This sumptuous 2006 release was recorded live in the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in late
1993 for European TV broadcast the following year. »
15 Apr 2007
Incongruity was the rule of the day in the New York City Opera’s production of Handel’s Flavio, which opened on Wednesday, April 4. »
12 Apr 2007
It was, of course, a coincidence; on the other hand, on Berlin’s vital, vibrant and
all-encompassing arts scene one is continually overwhelmed by new perspectives on the creative
process and its product. »
11 Apr 2007
“Linvitation au voyage” is an appropriate title for this collection of French song, which makes available a number of fine performances of both familiar and rare works. »
11 Apr 2007
With a label such as Gala, a purveyor of live recordings of various provenance, some adjustment to compromised sound quality can be expected. »
07 Apr 2007
The latest offering from the Baltimore Lyric Opera was Bedrich Smetana’s sparkling comedy Prodana Nevesta (“Bartered Bride”), a little gem of Czech Romantic nationalism that one does not see live very often these days. »
07 Apr 2007
This excellent disc brings together two ballet scores from the far ends of Leonard Bernstein’s compositional career. »
06 Apr 2007
Kurt Weill’s perennial appeal can be attributed to various factors, not the least of which is the genuine craft of his stage works. »
06 Apr 2007
Film music has become a sort of refuge for some music lovers turned off by the work of those serious music composers who have turned increasingly away from attempting an encounter with a broader public, retreating into an insular word of academic composition. »
04 Apr 2007
With some deliberation the Metropolitan Opera releases DVD versions of live television broadcasts from its heyday as a PBS mainstay. »
02 Apr 2007
Verdi's magnificent melodrama Il Trovatore may be the most masculine of his creations, but the production that San Diego Opera presented as the third opera of its 2007 season was a triumph for the ladies. »
30 Mar 2007
A classic Seinfeld episode revolved around a brush with the “third” of the Three Tenors - the one whom no one could quite put a name to. »
30 Mar 2007
Let’s face it, Handel’s “Poro, Re dell’Indie” (in English “Porus, King of India”) isn’t exactly a household name in any but the most dedicated baroque opera circles. »
28 Mar 2007
UC Opera now have a half-century’s reputation to live up to; they were responsible for the UK premieres of such works as Das Liebesverbot, The Maid of Orleans, Alzira, Oberto and the 1847 version of Macbeth. »
27 Mar 2007
Known almost iconically for his symphonies, Anton Bruckner devoted a great deal of his compositional output to vocal music, including choral works in both German and Latin. »
26 Mar 2007
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French instrumental music was closely identified with dance and dance suites. »
26 Mar 2007
Although milestones in the history of opéra-comique, Grétry’s operas are infrequently revived and rarely recorded. »
25 Mar 2007
With the trials and tribulations of a multicultural society currently at the forefront of the British media, Gavin Quinn’s production placed a light-hearted focus on the bizarreness of a group of foreigners being thrown together in an unfamiliar situation. »
25 Mar 2007
This 2005 production of the Mozart-Da Ponte masterpiece Don Giovanni makes for a frustrating experience. »
25 Mar 2007
London is fortunate to have played host to several productions of Tchaikovsky’s best-known opera in the last three years alone, most recently British Youth Opera’s heartbreakingly fresh account last September – so it was a risky decision on ETO’s part to stage yet another. »
21 Mar 2007
When Matilde di Shabran was premiered in Rome on Feb. 24, 1821, it was billed as a
“melodrama giocoso” (which is the equivalent of an opera semiseria), somewhere between an opera buffa and an opera seria in character. »
21 Mar 2007
Asked in an interview by Opera News on his opinion on updating, James Levine replied that it often intensified one or another aspect of the story but that in general it was not possible to update without distorting the story and the equilibrium in the whole opera. »
21 Mar 2007
Our modern sense of the eighteenth-century Lutheran cantata derives in large part from the works of J. S. Bach—works that have been foundational in the early music movement, works that have much shaped our understanding of Bach, and works that we now know in an impressive array of different recordings. »
21 Mar 2007
I am surely not the only one who doesn’t understand why this sparkling score is not performed
more often. »
21 Mar 2007
In setting the scene or furthering the action on stage, the opera chorus often provides some
memorable aural scenery in works by composers from Claudio Monteverdi to Arnold
Schoenberg, and this collection offers a representative selection of examples from both those
composers, and well as a number of others. Recorded on 14 January 2004, this concert of the
Stuttgart Staatsopernchor and Staatsorchester offered a program devoted to memorable choruses. »
21 Mar 2007
Based from concerts given on 22 August, 7 September, and 8 September 2005, this recording of
Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is the latest release of the Concertgebouw’s own RCO Live label. »
20 Mar 2007
Nice Opera, on the French Cote d’Azur, seemed a most suitable place for this early work by
Handel. »
20 Mar 2007
In their attempt to recreate a combination of musical styles typical of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Nürnberg, Schola Hungarica and its directors László Dobszay & Janka Szendrei have chosen selections from the Gänsebuch, described as the “only complete extant source for the pre-Reformation liturgy of the mass in Nürnberg.” [CD liner-notes, p. 3] »
20 Mar 2007
I never heard the 1966 live recording with Margherita Rinaldi and Paolo Montarsolo and I don’t
have a clue what the sound picture is like. »
19 Mar 2007
A near-capacity audience, expectant and enthusiastic, streamed into the Dorothy Chandler for an old-fashioned evening of operatic glamour, as Angela Gheorghiu, with the Los Angeles Opera Orchestra in support, flew into town for a one night concert. »
19 Mar 2007
This year is Thomas Adés’ annus mirabilis. He’s the subject of a major, six-week retrospective at the Barbican, and, of course, will be a major presence at the Aldeburgh Festival. »
13 Mar 2007
Speaking to a trusted chorus-member friend after this performance, I was told that I had benefited from not having seen this production when new three months ago. »
13 Mar 2007
Just about halfway though his first season as music director of Los Angeles Opera, James Conlon has already made himself an endearing and appreciated figure. »
13 Mar 2007
Perhaps the gestation period for “Wakonda’s Dream,” premiered by Opera Omaha on March 7, was too long. »
13 Mar 2007
Two weeks before viewing these DVD’s, I attended a performance of the same opera at De Vlaamse Opera in a new production by Ivo van Hove; Flemish boss of the most important Amsterdam theatre company. »
08 Mar 2007
With the distance of time, is it allowable to feel affection for Herbert von Karajan, beyond any respect — grudging or otherwise — for his long, starry career? »
08 Mar 2007
Recorded between 18 and 29 June 1984 at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, this production of Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nűrnberg makes a classic presentation of the opera available in a two-DVD set issued in 2006 by Deutsche Grammophon. »
08 Mar 2007
This concert was given on New Year’s eve in the year 2000, and the frail Claudio Abbado who
comes out to conduct makes for an alarming sight. »
08 Mar 2007
It was in the “Orwell year” 1984 that Götz Friedrich, general manager — Intendant — of the Deutsche Oper Berlin (DOB) from 1983 until his death in 2000, staged the first half of Wagner’s “Ring des Nibelungen” in the 1900-seat house on Berlin’s Bismarckstrasse. »
06 Mar 2007
It is well known that the Opera Orchestra of New York’s performances are required events for
opera aficionados to hear the the most exciting performances of the season. »
06 Mar 2007
Compared with Pamina and Tamino, Kumudha and her Prince, the central figures in “A Flowering Tree,” the John Adams and Peter Sellars collaboration given its American premiere on March 1 by the San Francisco Symphony, walk a rock-strewn road. »
28 Feb 2007
The death this month of director Stephen Pimlott could have cast a shadow over this revival of his 1993 production, but a hugely affectionate pre-show tribute by colleague Nicholas Hytner ensured that the performance only served to do great honour to the memory of a man who was clearly loved and cherished by many. »
28 Feb 2007
The booklet essay writer effuses passionately about this filmed Kalman operetta, Die Csárdásfürstin. Jürgen Otten gushes over the "immortal melodies," Anna Moffo's "precious jewel" of a voice, and Rene Kollo's "innate nobility." »
28 Feb 2007
The Rosenblatt Recital Series, which presents concerts around London from artists ranging from the well-known to the brand-new, last week showcased Nicole Cabell, the glamorous 29-year-old winner of the 2005 Cardiff Singer of the World competition. »
27 Feb 2007
Originally released by Deutsche Grammophon in 1976, this recording of selected songs by Sergei
Rachmaninov (1873-1943) and Mikhail Glinka (1804-57) make available some fine examples of
Russian art song to Western audiences. »
27 Feb 2007
Why should anyone buy a German language broadcast of a delicious French opéra-comique? »
27 Feb 2007
John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach Cantata Pilgrimage continues to echo with the release of concert
recordings of this historic millennial tour. »
27 Feb 2007
As familiar Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser is, the opera benefits from solid performances that bring together fine singing, exquisite orchestral playing, and effective staging, and the Metropolitan Opera’s 1982 production conducted by James Levine gave audiences an exemplary performance that remains a touchstone for this work. »
27 Feb 2007
This wasn’t an “easy” program for dilettantes. »
26 Feb 2007
If there ever was a moment where architecture and music became passionately tied to one another, it would be when the polychoral music of the 16th century was tied to St. Mark’s
cathedral in Venice. »
22 Feb 2007
At the curtain call for the first night of WNO’s new production of the infrequently performed Khovanshchina director David Pountney wore a simple Russian shirt. »
21 Feb 2007
Carmen was one of Victoria de los Angeles’ favorite roles and she brought to it much that we
hear on this recording of French songs: a winsome voice without heavy vibrato, a close attention to musical detail, and an evident understanding of the French words that she conveys, if not with an impeccable accent, at least with a convincingly understandable pronunciation. »
20 Feb 2007
Yes, the German title must be employed for this filmed Nozze en Deutsch from 1967. »
20 Feb 2007
Recorded on 28 March 1970 in Rome, this recording of Parsifal makes available a live
performance conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch, one of the foremost interpreters of Wagner’s works in his day. »
18 Feb 2007
Franz Joseph Haydn’s Seven Last Words is well known, both as a familiar part of modern Lenten devotions and also as something of a stylistic oddity, I suspect. »
18 Feb 2007
From the 2005 season of the “reborn” La Fenice comes this Dynamic DVD of Wagner’s Parsifal. »
18 Feb 2007
Friday night in Leeds, in the North of England, at the city’s marvellously restored Grand Theatre, with the pavements outside shining wet and a tidal wave of umbrellas surging past, was an
exciting place to be. »
16 Feb 2007
In dedicating much of his creative life to the Thomaskirche, the German musician Günther
Ramin left his mark on the musical life of Leipzig, and his legacy includes a fine recording of
Johannes Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem, op. 45. »
16 Feb 2007
Perhaps the best-known of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies, the Fourth also benefits from a
number of fine recordings. »
16 Feb 2007
The Opera Lafayette of Washington DC has been engaged in a new project this season – the Armide Project, as the group dubbed its ambitious plan, in collaboration with the University of Maryland Opera Studio, to present two great operas set to the same celebrated Philippe Quinault libretto. »
14 Feb 2007
Giovanni Battista Sammartini (c.1700-1775) belongs to that shadowy generation of Italian composers who no longer composed in the high Baroque style, but had adopted the clarity, simplicity and regularity that would serve as the building blocks for the Viennese masters of the late eighteenth century, and thus were tagged with the rather pejorative label “pre-classic” (a plague on all those music historians who can only see musical style in terms of progress leading to their particular figure of veneration!). »
13 Feb 2007
The great American opera? Ricky Ian Gordon’s “Grapes of Wrath” might be it. »
09 Feb 2007
An expressionist portrait of the Roman she-wolf was the first, striking image of this production, originally devised for Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, by the fashionable British director David McVicar. »
09 Feb 2007
The duo of gambist Vittorio Ghielmi and lutenist Luca Pianca even has its own domain name
(www.pianca-ghielmi.com), as well as several previous releases, of which the first has perhaps my favorite CD title ever (Bagpipes from Hell). »
09 Feb 2007
The English, though fundamental to the early music revival of the last half-century, have been rather remiss in exploring their native music dating from after the death of Purcell, and particularly that produced after the death of Handel. »
08 Feb 2007
Sorry my friends, but this rich-looking DVD has a feature that disqualifies it for me. »
08 Feb 2007
A literary critic once recalled the day when a German could not clear his throat “without finding pithy precedent in Goethe.” »
08 Feb 2007
In opera, Rossini, born in 1892- the year after Mozart died, is the successor of the great master
and, when performed as perceptively as in the “Cenerentola” that debuted at the Houston Grand Opera on January 27, his rightful heir. »
07 Feb 2007
During any recital by an aging divo there comes a moment of truth when he sings an operatic aria
(usually E lucevan le stelle , as the highest note is an A). That is the defining moment when he no longer can hide behind idiosyncratic interpretation, expressive breathing and a lot of clever transpositions. »
07 Feb 2007
This disc is a reissue of a 1993 recording made at Skywalker Sound in Marin County, California, but new to me. »
06 Feb 2007
I suppose you will find this quite an addition to the Melchior legacy if you are a collector of every sound Melchior ever uttered. »
06 Feb 2007
The Kirov Opera and Orchestra concluded their annual residency at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC last week with a Sunday matinee concert performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1932 Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District. »
06 Feb 2007
Neither of these late works (the Judicium Salomonis is from 1702) is new to disc – the former
has two recent recordings, from ten and from twenty years ago, and the latter one, by Herreweghe, released in 1985. »
06 Feb 2007
The title Walewska i przjaciele, “Walewska and friends,” reflects the intention of the mezzo soprano Małgorzata Walewska, one of the foremost contemporary Polish singers to present herself and some of her colleagues in recording of various kinds of music. »
05 Feb 2007
Why do some conductors make it and others don’t? »
28 Jan 2007
Rossini’s last Italian opera, staged in 1825 as a part of Charles X’s coronation festivities, is a bizarre creation — a sassy little farce capped with a coronation cantata in the best traditions of staged court entertainment, from 16th-century Italian intermedi through their Baroque and Classic operatic progeny. »
28 Jan 2007
While many associate it with traditional music, the Salzburg Festival is also a venue for new
productions and, to a degree, new compositions. »
28 Jan 2007
The reason for being of this set is Gruberova’s wish to record as much as possible of her repertory (on her own label as most of the majors were either not interested in recording belcanto operas or had their own stars like Decca’s Joan Sutherland). »
28 Jan 2007
Who is the potential consumer for this DVD release of a 1953 Italian film version of Verdi's Aida, featuring Sophia Loren's stunning physical presence and Renata Tebaldi's stunning vocalism in the title role? »
24 Jan 2007
Let it be said at the outset that, at least to my eyes, the packaging and marketing of this DVD is
somewhat misleading. »
24 Jan 2007
A welcome addition to the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s own line of releases, this CD is a compilation of two works by Gustav Mahler that the late Klaus Tennstedt performed with the ensemble and which have not been issued previously. »
24 Jan 2007
I saw my first Káťa 37 years ago during the Flanders Festival. At the time it was still an almost complete novelty on the scene and the Czech company performed it according to the composer’s intentions. »
23 Jan 2007
Sébastien de Brossard (1655-1730) was, until recently, known to the musical world (if he was known at all) as a lexicographer (he prepared the first French musical dictionary, published in 1703) and collector, whose collection went entire, together with a catalogue he prepared, to the National Library in Paris, something which must have been almost unheard of in early eighteenth-century Europe, though commonplace today (imagine if Bach had managed to do the same with his scores!). »
23 Jan 2007
There are three reasons often cited for the paucity of performances of Rossini’s Otello: the horrible hack job of the Shakespearean drama by librettist Francesco Maria Berio, the difficulties in casting an opera requiring at least three top-rate tenor voices, and comparisons with Verdi’s popular opera of the same title. »
23 Jan 2007
True to the title of this collection, the present volume of correspondence edited by Henry-Louis de La Grange and Günther Weiss — here translated, revised , and supplemented by Antony Beaumont — offers, to date, the most complete body of letters of Gustav Mahler to his wife Alma. »
21 Jan 2007
The sleeve notes of this interesting issue state that “ any comparison between La Fattucchiera and Italian bel canto models by Bellini or Donizetti would be too easy though it became commonplace to describe him (= Cuyàs) as the continuator of the school of Bellini. »
21 Jan 2007
Although the name of Vicente Martin y Soler is no longer obscure, most opera lovers still know him best due to Mozart quoting his opera ‘Una cosa rara’ during the Don’s last meal in Don Giovanni. »
21 Jan 2007
I was impressed by Karajan’s intense conducting, which seems so right in the wake of the unavoidable tragedy that is going to happen. »
21 Jan 2007
Record companies are dominated by accountants and short term cost structure seems to be more important than artistic results or even sale figures. This is a prime example. »
21 Jan 2007
For those OperaToday readers prone to fantasies about being a member of royalty with one's own cozy opera house tucked away on the hereditary estate, this Hungaroton DVD will enable that desire. Filmed in August 2005 at the royal palace at Gödölló, Il barone di rocca antica, an operetta giocosa from Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, requires only four singers. »
21 Jan 2007
There is a (no doubt apocryphal) story that if one listens carefully to Caballé’s recordings there is a slight sshhh-sound in the background; the sound of the knife she uses to cut open her scores while recording. »
21 Jan 2007
This issue from DG’s own classic recital series is a copy of the 1963 LP. »
21 Jan 2007
Serge Jaroff and his Don Cossacks Choir were for many decades legendary performers of Russian choral music, ranging from the liturgical works of Orthodoxy to beloved regional folk melodies. »
21 Jan 2007
This Sellars production had its origins at the 1985 Pepsico Summerfare Festival in Purchase NY. »
19 Jan 2007
These recordings prove decisively a well-known thesis: more or less realistic productions always age better than so called innovative modern productions which often only aggrandize the clichés of the time of their conception if one views them a few decades after their première. »
17 Jan 2007
If the audience for new American art music seems small and is (supposedly) shrinking, then the
audience for new American operas is even more exclusive. »
17 Jan 2007
Some interesting repertory choices and the participation of some of today's most attractive singers make this particular "gala" evening of "walk on-sing-walk off" entertainment more consistently enjoyable than these affairs often are. »
16 Jan 2007
The ever-busy Brian Large directed the 1989 filming (for TV) of a Wolfgang Wagner Tannhäuser production which had debuted at Bayreuth in 1985. »
16 Jan 2007
Recording a Shostakovich cycle has become de rigueur in recent years — a conductor’s mandatory right of passage, like recording a Beethoven or a Mahler cycle. »
15 Jan 2007
“Era la notte” presents four highly emotional, seventeenth-century Italian works, sung with commanding theatricality by Anna Caterina Antonacci. »
12 Jan 2007
It is a mystery as complex as the Kirov’s Ring Cycle staging and equally inexplicable. »
12 Jan 2007
Most heroes in costume drama movies speak lines directly from our own time. I’ve yet to see a cinematic Roman general, being a serious hero, look at an animal’s liver and says: “ this smells bad; no battle today”. »
12 Jan 2007
The recording date is given as November the 12th 1994. Since recording sessions usually last more than one day, and as a radio orchestra is playing, we may safely assume this CD to be derived from a public broadcasted concert by the ‘4 sopranos’ capitalizing on the concept made popular by Domingo, Carreras, and Pavarotti. »
10 Jan 2007
The booklet essay by Gottfried Kraus (translated from the German by Stewart Spencer) for this TDK release of the 1983 Salzburg Così fan tutte presents an intriguing history of the opera, with the Austrian festival taking in a central role in the work’s return to the standard repertory. »
10 Jan 2007
The artsong in the twentieth century benefits from the efforts of national composers, like Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959), who stimulated the genre by incorporating regional folk elements into their music. »
07 Jan 2007
Decca loves to repackage this set. Your reviewer first acquired it as a low-price "Double Decca" release, with no libretto. Just a couple years ago saw another incarnation, with a great cover pic of Price and Karajan locked in an embrace - Karajan as Scarpia? Or Cavaradossi - take one's pick. »
07 Jan 2007
The cover art for the Opus Arts DVD of Wagner's Siegfried, from the Nederlandse Opera in 1999, features Mime, as impersonated by Graham Clark, in amazing make-up and costume: a bald, bulging head almost split down the middle by a furrow of anxiety, and clad in a ghastly green insect-like carapace, including wire-like hair and a bobbing tail-sack. »
07 Jan 2007
Notable among recent releases, the set of the Complete Symphonies by Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) on DVD makes available some fine performances of the composer’s important contributions to the genre. »
29 Dec 2006
