20 Jul 2008
“Quelle plaisir” to encounter Gustave Charpentier’s seldom performed “Louise” at the Paris Opera in a production where most everything went spectacularly right. »
20 Jul 2008
The Bayerische Staatsoper, based in three spectacular houses where Mozart, Wagner and many other composers premiered their works, presents over 300 annual performances to a discerning public. »
13 Jul 2008
Bernd Alois Zimmermann was a sensitive, none too healthy 21-year-old music prodigy in 1939, when he was drafted into the German army. »
13 Jul 2008
For Sir William Walton, the protracted genesis of Troilus and Cressida must have seemed more akin to the agonies of Sisyphus than to the composition of an opera. »
13 Jul 2008
Originating at the Châtelet, where the narration was given in French, Robert Carsen's staging of Bernstein's unique satire worked rather well in its television broadcast from the Parisian house late in 2006. »
13 Jul 2008
The disastrous 1904 La Scala premiere of Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly is one of those famous annals of opera which tend to leave today’s audiences perplexed about all the uproar. »
13 Jul 2008
The concert “20th-Century Masters,” presented by the Grant Park Music Festival, Chicago on 27 and 28 June 2008 featured several pieces performed for the first time under the auspices of the Festival. »
06 Jul 2008
David Gockley heard the cries of many an opera fan that Pamela Rosenberg had denied them their 'stars,' so for his summer season, 2008, he brought them Natalie Dessay, Susan Graham, Ruth Ann Swenson, and Stefan Margita. »
06 Jul 2008
My visit to two rarely mounted pieces at the Opera Festival of St. Louis brought to mind the little girl with the curl, for when it was good, it was very very good and when it was bad, it was, um. . .er. . . »
23 Jun 2008
In the latter part of last year, the casting for Nicholas Hytner’s new production of Don Carlo — in the five-act Italian version — looked to be on shaky ground. »
23 Jun 2008
No one has ever called Gazzaniga’s Don Giovanni an overlooked masterpiece. »
22 Jun 2008
Pink flamingos, sheep on wheels, and a queen crowned with giant antlers all inhabit the zany world of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’s Una cosa rara, where the artificial 18th century pastoral commingles with cutesy country colors and 1950s yard art. »
15 Jun 2008
On the barren stage: a few chairs, a dark-gold hectoplasm projected on the wood panels of the acoustic chamber - nothing more. »
15 Jun 2008
For the belated Spanish premiere of Britten’s Death in Venice, 35 years after its creation in Aldeburgh, Barcelona seems a felicitous choice. »
09 Jun 2008
For Bellini’s “I Capuleti e i Montecchi,” Paris Opera peopled its revival with plenty of star power. »
09 Jun 2008
When the Ringling Brothers folded their tents, opera took over. Aïda with elephants, and Walküre with real horses. »
09 Jun 2008
It is a bit hard to know what to make of Olivier Messiaen’s colossal piece “Saint François d’Assise,” beautifully mounted by Netherlands Opera. »
08 Jun 2008
If you are going to produce Jacques Fromental Halevy’s forgotten opera “Clari,” I urge you to first make sure you have a signature on the contact from a superstar with the firepower of Cecilia Bartoli. »
04 Jun 2008
It is worth remembering that prior to the première of Strauss’s opera in 1911, the working title was ‘Ochs auf Lerchenau’. »
04 Jun 2008
Opera producers in quest of headlines, unable to make them from the limited number of Mozart operas available (all of them far too familiar) but equipped with the flood of attractive young singers trained to sing Mozart in conservatories (because singing Mozart does not harm young voices, and
singing Verdi and Wagner before 30 — better yet, 40 — often will), sometimes turn to Mozart’s contemporary, Cimarosa, and his Il Matrimonio Segreto, to get attention. »
04 Jun 2008
Handel’s Rodrigo, subtitled ‘Vincer se stesso è la maggior vittoria’ (Self-conquest is the greater victory) is one of the composer’s earliest operatic works, and rarely heard. »
28 May 2008
Chicago Opera Theater scored a resounding success with its area premiere of John Adams’ newest stage piece, “A Flowering Tree.” »
28 May 2008
Upon its premiere at Chicago’s Lyric Opera in 1997 Anthony Davis’ Amistad found little critical favor. Its undisciplined excesses led one writer to compare it to a high-school pageant. »
27 May 2008
In these days of 'concept' productions, it is rare that the curtain goes up on the first act of an opera and it looks exactly as one might reasonably expect it to. »
27 May 2008
I can still remember my first ever “Pelleas et Melisande” in my first ever outing at San Francisco Opera during my first ever visit to that beautiful town. »
25 May 2008
A recent visit to Berlin’s three opera houses yielded decidedly, nay wildly varying outcomes. »
15 May 2008
The Gotham Chamber Opera has been delighting opera fans on the Lower East Side for seven years now, one small audience at a time. »
13 May 2008
Thirty-six years after Sarah Caldwell and the Opera Company of Boston presented the first complete staged performances in the United States, Hector Berlioz’ Les Troyens returned to Boston in triumph in a series of concert performances presented by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the baton of James Levine to close the BSO’s 2007-2008 season. »
13 May 2008
Opera companies should practice historic preservation, keeping certain productions forever in the repertory because of their quality and aesthetic value. »
13 May 2008
Prometeo is so radically different that it’s almost incomprehensible heard from preconceived assumptions of what music “ought” to be. »
12 May 2008
John Brown might have been a’mouldering in his grave since he was hanged in 1859, but he was resurrected — in body and spirit — on May 3, when the Lyric Opera of Kansas City staged the world premiere of Kirke Mechem’s John Brown. »
09 May 2008
When Toronto’s Opera Atelier asked her to sing Elettra in Mozart’s Idomeneo Measha Brueggergosman hesitated. »
09 May 2008
In 2007 it was an experiment; now it’s a new summer festival firmly rooted in fertile Texas turf with a bright view of its second season and of the more distant future as well. »
07 May 2008
Die Entführung aus dem Serail is too light to be a grand opera, but it makes rather grander demands of its singers than operetta could possibly bear. »
06 May 2008
English National Opera’s production of Harrison Birtwistle’s ‘Punch and Judy’ is the company’s second collaboration with the Young Vic Theatre — following the premiere of Neuwirth’s ‘Lost Highway’ a few weeks earlier — and remarkably, also the second London production of this early Birtwistle work within a month, the previous one having been at the Linbury Studio Theatre, a collaboration between Music Theatre Wales and the Royal Opera. »
06 May 2008
Over the years, one tried and true method of packing audiences in to the concerts of Robert Bass’s Collegiate Chorale has been to present concert opera with impressive soloists. »
04 May 2008
Martha Graham used to say, “In order for there to be dance, there must be something that needs to be danced.” »
04 May 2008
When the Met presented La Fille du Régiment for Lily Pons during World War II, she sought permission to wave the Cross of Lorraine, symbol of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French, during the Salut à la France in Act II. »
04 May 2008
Why does one so seldom encounter Dvořák’s Rusalka on stage? »
25 Apr 2008
Satyagraha is an odd duck to encounter if you are seeking a traditional opera-going experience or anything like it. »
23 Apr 2008
Victor DeRenzi is a man of convictions — and of courage. Given his commitment to tradition, you might call DeRenzi, artistic director of Sarasota Opera since 1982, conservative. »
22 Apr 2008
With what might (if one were risking facetiousness) be termed a “false-set” of four countertenors in the cast, this was always going to be an intriguing production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare for aficionados of a voice type which has revolutionised the perception (and popularity) of baroque opera over the past 15 years. »
21 Apr 2008
Harrison Birtwistle’s new full-scale opera, commissioned by the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, is a study of isolation and imprisonment. »
21 Apr 2008
It was one of Queler’s good nights. »
21 Apr 2008
It is, you might say, the little opera that can. True, if it’s size of the budget, the price of tickets and the number of seats that concerns you, the Komische Oper is clearly the third of Berlin’s opera houses. »
21 Apr 2008
What to make of "Lucrezia Borgia"? I have always felt that, some lovely arias notwithstanding, this Donizetti work never really gets going until the slam-bang soprano-baritone duet in Act II. »
09 Apr 2008
That Fed Dostoevsky – sure plays a mean pinball! »
08 Apr 2008
Plainly put, Frankfurt Opera’s “The Rape of Lucretia” could be offered as a textbook example of just how great a performance can be when everything goes right. »
07 Apr 2008
BERLIN — Which car-rental agency was it that was once No. 2 and “trying harder?” »
06 Apr 2008
In a climate in which bel canto opera seems to be enjoying a steady and welcome revival, ETO opened their current season with a welcome production of Donizetti's historically dubious account of the latter days of Anne Boleyn. The company's... »
06 Apr 2008
The most interesting opera on ETO's Spring 2008 tour was Carlisle Floyd's 1950s tale of religious hypocrisy in the rural Deep South, based on the Apocryphal tale of Susannah and the Elders. »
06 Apr 2008
The last of the three operas on ETO's Spring 2008 tour was sung in English, and updated to a Spain of the mid-twentieth century under Franco. »
![Kurt Streit as Idomeneo [Photo by Terrence McCarthy courtesy of San Francisco Opera]](http://70.32.73.199/Idomeneo1.png)