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. »
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. »
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
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. »
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. »