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
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. »
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 . »
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
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
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.
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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.
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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. »
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
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
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
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.
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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
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. »
![Nicola Luisotti [Photo by Roger Steen]](http://www.operatoday.com/NicolaLuisotti_03.gif)