The annual visit of Glyndebourne Opera to the BBC Proms has become an eagerly awaited event.
La Esmeralda: Opéra in four acts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Robert Baksa is a name that is well-known to lovers of contemporary chamber music, with a hundred chamber works to his credit.
One of the leading lights of Berg’s Vienna was the architect Adolf Loos, the great crusader against ornament.
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.
The fourteen year old Rossini composed his first opera Demetrio e Polibio in 1806 though it was not performed for another six years.
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?
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.
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.
The performances of Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann at Santa Fe Opera this summer are the based on Michael Kaye’s edition of the score.
Seattle, the city of software and Starbucks, is also a summer site for serious Wagnerites.
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.
Does this Tan Dun opera prove or disprove that for East and West, the twain shall never meet?
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.
By Rosemary Sorensen [The Australian, 2 September 2010]
PUCCINI'S La Boheme is about Mimi, that pathetic creature who loves oh so briefly, then is snuffed out, coughing up her guts with a bad case of consumption. Never mind that she is able - poor and ill though she may be - to warble at the top of her spotty lungs and drive her lover to distraction. Mimi is a tragic maid.
[SFGate.com, 2 September 2010]
Dear Mr. Kosman: How come we don't have any modern opera composers that approach those of the past? When you hear "Carmen" or "Tosca," you can hum the melodies of those compositions, but I dare anyone to hum the melodies of anything composed after 1930. It would be so nice to hear a new "warhorse" opera. Where is the modern-day version of Verdi, Wagner, Puccini or Bizet?
By Dylan Loeb McClain [NY Times, 2 September 2010]
Sunday’s chess column was about Noam Elkies, a Harvard mathematics professor who is also a music composer and chess player. Though Elkies is unusual at being talented in all three areas, he is not entirely unique. Through the years, there have been a number of strong chess players who were excellent mathematicians or musicians.
By BWW News Desk [Broadway World, 1 September 2010]
Washington National Opera (WNO) and The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts have announced the retirement of Music Director Heinz Fricke. The announcement marks the conclusion of the German maestro's remarkable 18-year tenure leading the Washington National Opera Orchestra and the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, which cooperatively share a corps of 61 professional musicians.
By Alan Rodger [Herald Scotland, 31 August 2010]
Michael Tumelty’s trenchant criticism of the decision to reduce the orchestra of Scottish Opera to half-time working is high on anger and suggestions of mischief (“Hang your head in shame, Scottish Opera, you are a disgrace to the nation”, Herald Arts, August 28).
Walter Weidringer [Die Presse, 30 August 2010]
Die Berliner Philharmoniker unter Simon Rattle triumphierten mit Schönberg, Webern und Berg. Mit solch beredtem Ausdruck erfüllten die Berliner auch die bewegenden Totenklagen von Weberns.
[Focus, 30 August 2010]
Dies war der Fall nach seinem Debüt an der legendären New Yorker Metropolitan Opera in La Traviata im Februar 2006. Die Erinnerungen daran (Meinen die wirklich mich?) lässt ihn an die Anfänge seiner Karriere in Deutschland in der Provinz, aber auch an persönliche Krisen zurückdenken. Aber wenn eine große alte Dame der Opernkunst wie Christa Ludwig meint, nachdem sie Kaufmann zum ersten Mal gehört hat, das ist ganz große Kunst, dann lässt das aufhorchen.
By Anna Picard [The Independent, 29 August 2010]
Gothic sensibility permeated the Royal Albert Hall on Monday evening: euphoric, melancholic, sun-dazzled and moon-drunk.
By Fiona Maddocks [The Guardian, 29 August 2010]
Driven and obsessive, drawing on 1970s jazz funk, soul and gospel, Mark-Anthony Turnage's new BBC Proms commission Hammered Out burst noisily upon the world at Thursday's world premiere conducted by David Robertson. A scrunchy havoc of whip, sleigh bells, saxophones, bass guitar, as well as the full forces of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Nibelung note of a household hammer for good measure, bashed, danced and whirled through this 15-minute non-stop toccata.
By Jeremy Eichler [Boston Globe, 29 August 2010]
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — The year in the photo is 1920. The great Viennese composer Alban Berg, 35 years old, stands at an open window of his Vienna home, gazing directly out at the camera yet also somehow beyond it. His face conceals like a mask. The breakthrough triumph of his first opera, “Wozzeck,’’ is five years in the unknowable future. We sense perhaps an air of reserved confidence, perhaps a tint of melancholy. But there is more to this picture.
Chicago, IL, August 28, 2010 --(PR.com)-- On October 22, Roosevelt University will host a multimedia opera production composed and produced by Kyong Mee Choi, assistant professor of music composition in the university’s music conservatory and recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. The opera will be held at Ganz Hall, Roosevelt University, 430 S. Michigan Ave., at 7:30 p.m.
By Richard Scheinin [San Jose Mercury News, 28 August 2010]
Future operatic soprano Jasmina Halimic discovered Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" as a schoolgirl in Bosnia. But it wasn't until years later -- after moving to the United States in 1994 -- that she really got it: Tolstoy's masterpiece became an Oprah's Book Club selection in 2004, and Halimic reread it while studying music in Indiana.
By Andrew Clark [Financial Times, 27 August 2010]
By choosing Oceans Apart for his 2010 theme, Edinburgh International Festival director Jonathan Mills opened up fertile avenues for exploration in spoken theatre and classical music, while leaving little room for manoeuvre in opera. The obvious choice was Puccini’s wild west thriller La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West). Premiered in New York 100 years ago and never previously heard in Scotland, it conjures a picture of the New World that, though seen through the eyes of a composer who had never experienced it, effectively captures the values of a frontier community.
By Lynsey Hanley [The Guardian, 27 August 2010]
There are more ways of divvying people up than according to how much money they've got. A survey this week by Reader's Digest concluded that a large proportion of Britain is culturally impoverished, with one-third of those surveyed never having listened to classical music and three-quarters unable to identify Edward Elgar as the composer of Pomp and Circumstance.
By Jessica Duchen [The Independent, 27 August 2010]
On Gustav Mahler's 11th birthday, the story goes, a family friend asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. "Jesus Christ," said the lad. To the astonished "Why?" he replied: "Because I want to suffer for other people."
[BBC, 27 August 2010]
The celebrated tenor Rolando Villazon is renowned for his exuberance when it comes to his beloved opera but he's equally passionate about the music of his Mexican homeland.
By Everett Evans [Houston Chronicle, 26 August 2010]
Siegfried, Brünnhilde, Wotan and company are heading for Houston, as Houston Grand Opera prepares to tackle the Mount Everest of opera, Richard Wagner's monumental Ring Cycle.
Christian Merlin [Le Figaro, 26 August 2010]
L'Opéra de Paris lance sa rentrée en douceur, avec trois reprises de productions anciennes ( Le Vaisseau fantôme, de Wagner, L'Italienne à Alger, de Rossini, Eugène Onéguine, de Tchaïkovski): sans l'attrait de la nouveauté, on ira surtout pour les distributions, avec notamment la brillante Vivica Genaux dans les vocalises rossiniennes et l'immense Ludovic Tézier en Onéguine.
By Leslie Sprout [NY Times, 26 August 2010]
Arthur Honegger’s “Chant de Libération” was not a piece I intended to consult during a research trip to Paris in June 2009. Like others who knew of it, I thought the score was lost. Honegger had composed this song for baritone, chorus and orchestra in secret during the German occupation of France. Its only known trace was a tantalizing description of its October 1944 premiere in liberated Paris: a “triumph” by a “musician of the Resistance,” the music critic Maurice Brillant wrote.
By Rowena Smith [The Guardian, 26 August 2010]
The festival's New World theme has already offered up one baroque representation of the Aztec emperor Montezuma in Graun's opera seria - here it presented another in the form of Purcell's music for The Indian Queen. Dramatically, the play from which the music was taken seems to have been an unwieldy work. The outline synopsis runs to seven pages in the concert programme and contains more twists, turns, and complicated relationships than an entire basket of Handel operas - not in themselves known for either their concision or their plot rationality.