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
Can Haiku be improved by staging? György Kurtág's Kafka-Fragmente (op. 24), is a masterpiece of zen-like purity. »
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
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
“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
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
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? »
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. »
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
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
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. »
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. »
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: »
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
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
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. »
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.. »
01 Sep 2010
The annual visit of Glyndebourne Opera to the BBC Proms has become an eagerly awaited event. »
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. »
![Maria Antunez as Rosa and Alfredo Daza as Tadeo [Photo by Robert Millard courtesy of Los Angeles Opera]](http://www.operatoday.com/SwR1225.gif)