05 Sep 2018
Mahler and I, at least in the concert hall, parted company over a decade ago - and with his Third Symphony it has been an even longer abandonment, fifteen years. Reviewing can nurture great love for music; but it can also become so obsessive for a single composer it can make one profoundly unresponsive to their music. This was my tragedy with Mahler. »
03 Sep 2018
With The Gondoliers of 1889, the main period of Arthur Sullivan's
celebrated collaboration with W. S. Gilbert came to an end, and with it the
golden age of British operetta. Sullivan was accordingly at liberty to
compose more serious and emotional operas, as he had long desired, and
turned first to the moribund tradition of "Grand Opera" with Ivanhoe (1891). »
03 Sep 2018
Famously, controversy is the stuff of Bayreuth, be it artistic, philosophic or political. As well occasionally a Bayreuth production can simply be illuminating, as is the Barrie Kosky production of Wagner’s only comedy, Die Meistersinger. »
02 Sep 2018
On 25th March 1875, Gilbert & Sullivan’s one-act operetta, Trial by Jury, opened at the Royalty Theatre on Dean Street, in Soho. 131 performances and considerable critical acclaim followed, and it out-ran is companion piece, Offenbach’s La Périchole. »
31 Aug 2018
“The power of sound” wrote Joseph Conrad, “has always been greater than the power of sense.” Verdi’s towering Requiem is all about the power of sound, not least because of all the great sacred works this is the one that least obviously seems sacred when you hear it. »
31 Aug 2018
A concert programme that offers a ‘Concerto for coloratura soprano’ and four of Richard Strauss’s orchestral songs promises to tick every box on a lover of the soprano voice’s wish-list. »
27 Aug 2018
At the 2018 International Opera Awards, Irish-Canadian mezzo-soprano Wallis Giunta was named ‘Young Singer of the Year’, having been awarded the same title by The Arts Desk in 2017, a year which also saw her pick up the ‘Breakthrough Artist in UK Opera’ award at the What’s on Stage Opera Awards. At this Cadogan Hall lunchtime chamber recital she was making her Proms debut, and Giunta gave an assured, audience-winning performance which suggested that such accolades are more than deserved and that it won’t be long before she’s invited back. »
26 Aug 2018
When this production debuted last summer at Glimmerglass, my Opera Today colleague James Sohre found it a thoroughly
successful mounting of George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward's noble but
problematic opera. »
26 Aug 2018
The Hollywood Reporter called it the greatest musical ever produced. Leonard Bernstein had expressed concerns about his first Broadway musical, writing to Aaron Copland, ‘Maybe it will be a great hit, and maybe it will lay the great egg of all time. It’s an enormous gamble’, but in the event, On the Town opened at Broadway’s Adelphi Theatre on 28th December 1944 to rave reviews and laid golden foundation stones for the career paths of its prodigious creators - Bernstein, choreographer Jerome Robbins and writers Adolph Green and Betty Comden, whose average age at the time was twenty-seven. »
25 Aug 2018
Oh no, not another Barber! Well, it is the 150th anniversary of the world’s greatest opera composer so what better way to commemorate the occasion than to program his most famous opera! And hope for the best. »
23 Aug 2018
Music reigned supreme at Glyndebourne’s production of Handel’s Saul, with warm lyricism and exquisite delicacy offered by its
soloists alongside an impressive powerhouse of a Chorus. »
23 Aug 2018
2018 may mark the 150th anniversary of Rossini’s death but of more interest is that it marks the 200th anniversary of the two operas he composed in 1818 — the one-act farce Adina, though not performed until 1826 in Lisbon (and rarely since) and the “dramma serio” Ricciardo e Zoraide, “a grotesque mixture of stupidities and improbabilities” according to a 1927 Rossini biographer. »
23 Aug 2018
What defines a ‘diva’? The Italian word, which came to be used in an operatic context at the end of the nineteenth century, derives from the Latin divus, meaning ‘goddess’. »
22 Aug 2018
Eclectic, even visionary, Proms are one of the great hallmarks of this summer music festival - and this concert certainly fell into that category. On paper, little seemed to unify the first and second halves of the programme: Wagner and Richard Strauss with a (very overdue) UK premiere of Per Nørgård’s Third Symphony. »
21 Aug 2018
We are accustomed to seeing Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo at the helm of a large orchestra, baton in hand, guiding the instrumentalists with unassuming but precise authority and expressive, communicative musicianship. »
19 Aug 2018
Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra took us through fairy-tale forests, antique lands and into fantasy worlds in this fabulous Prom, which celebrated Maurice Ravel’s genius as a musical story-teller. »
19 Aug 2018
Hans Werner Henze’s fifth opera, The Bassarids (those who wear fox skins) had its world premiere at Salzburg’s Grosses Festspielhaus in 1966. Now, 52 years later Henze’s massive “opera seria” returns, but to the Felsenreitschule —the old riding school made into a theater that hosts the Salzburg Festival’s difficult operas, the Grosses Festspielhaus now dedicated to the grand repertoire. »
17 Aug 2018
Two French commemorations - ‘anniversaries’ always seems the wrong word - and surely is - here: the centenary of the deaths of Claude Debussy and Lili Boulanger. »
16 Aug 2018
It was emeritus night at the Salzburg Festival with 75 year old maestro Mariss Jansons conducting 77 year old stage director Hans Neuenfels production about Pushkin’s 87 year old countess known as the Pique Dame. »
15 Aug 2018
Three electrifying moments and the world is forever changed. »
15 Aug 2018
A Romeo Castellucci production is always news, it is even bigger news just now in Salzburg where Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian has made her debut as the fifteen year-old Salome. »
14 Aug 2018
Prom 41 at the Royal Albert Hall, London, with Edward Gardner conducting the BBCSO in Vaughan Williams's Dona nobis pacem, Elgar's Cello Concerto (Jean-Guihen Queyras) and Lili Boulanger . Extremely perceptive performances that revealed deep insight, far more profound than the ostensible "1918" theme »
12 Aug 2018
There were two, equal ‘stars’ of this performance of the authorised concert version of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story at the Royal Albert Hall: ‘Lenny’ himself, whose vibrant score - by turns glossy and edgy - truly shone, and conductor John Wilson, who made it gleam, and who made us listen afresh and intently to every coloristic detail and toe-tapping, twisting rhythm. »
11 Aug 2018
One of the joys of writing regularly – sometimes, just sometimes, I think too regularly – about performance has been the transformation, both conscious and unconscious, of my scholarship. »
09 Aug 2018
I am not sure I could find much of a connection between the two works on offer here. They offered ‘contrast’ of a sort, I suppose, yet not in a meaningful way such as I could discern. »
08 Aug 2018
It’s an all too rare pleasure to see Puccini’s only comedy as a stand alone opera. And more so when it is a careful production that uncovers the all too often overlooked musical and dramatic subtleties that abound in Puccini’s last opera. »
07 Aug 2018
The mood in the city is certainly soporific at the moment, as the blistering summer heat takes its toll and the thermometer shows no signs of falling. Fittingly, mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly and pianist Joseph Middleton presented a recital of English song settings united by the poetic themes of night, sleep, dreams and nightmares, juxtaposing masterpieces of the early-twentieth-century alongside new works by Mark-Anthony Turnage and Australian composer Lisa Illean, and two ‘long-lost’ songs by Britten. »
07 Aug 2018
“His child! It must not be born!” Keith Warner’s new production of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa for Glyndebourne Festival Opera makes two births, one intimated, the other aborted, the driving force of the tragedy which consumes two women, Vanessa and her niece Erika, rivals for the same young man, Anatol, son of Vanessa’s former lover. »
05 Aug 2018
Santa Fe Opera welcomed home a winningly animated production of L’Italiana in Algeri this season that utterly delighted a vociferously responsive audience. »
05 Aug 2018
Richard Strauss Salomé from the Salzburg Festival, conducted by Franz Welser-Möst, a powerful interpretation of an opera which defies easy answers, performed and produced with such distinction thast it suceeds on every level. The words "Te saxa Loquuntur" (The stones are speaking to you) are projected onto the stage. Salzburg regulars will recognize this as a reference to the rock foundations on which part of the city is built, and the traditions of excellence the Festival represents. In this opera, the characters talk at cross-purposes, hearing without understanding. The phrase suggests that what might not be explicitly spoken might have much to reveal.
»
04 Aug 2018
In this, her Proms debut, Anna Prohaska offered something akin to a cantata of two queens, complementary and contrasted: Dido and Cleopatra. Returning in a sense to her ‘early music’ roots – her career has always been far richer, more varied, but that world has always played an important part – she collaborated with the Italian ‘period’ ensemble, Il Giardino Armonico and Giovanni Antonini. »
04 Aug 2018
And so, this year’s Munich Opera Festival and this year’s Bavarian State Opera season came to a close with everyone’s favourite Bühnenweihfestspiel, Parsifal, in the final outing this time around for Pierre Audi’s new production. »
03 Aug 2018
What more could we want than having Peter Sellars re-imagine his acclaimed staging of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic at the renowned Santa Fe Opera festival? »
03 Aug 2018
Santa Fe Opera has an enduring reputation for its Strauss, and this season’s enjoyable Ariadne auf Naxos surely made John Crosby smile proudly. »