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13 Jul 2020
Mozart and Salieri, an opera in one act consisting of two scenes.
Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), composer. Libretto derived from Alexander Puskhin's play of the same name.
First performance: 7 December 1898 in Moscow. »
14 Jun 2020
Boris Godunov, an opera in four acts with prologue
Modest Mussorgsky, composer. Libretto by the composer, based on Alexander Pushkin's drama Boris Godunov and Nikolai Karamazin's History of the Russian Empire
First performance: 8 February 1874 at the Mariinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg »
02 Apr 2020
La Gioconda, dramma lirico in four acts.Music composed by Amilcare Ponchielli (1834–1886). Libretto by Arrigo Boito (under the pseudonym Tobia Gorrio), based upon Victor Hugo's Angelo, Tyrant of Padua (1835). »
02 Apr 2020
Don Carlo, an opera in four acts. Music composed by Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901). Libretto by Joseph Méry and Camille Du Locle after Friedrich von Schiller’s dramatic poem Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien. Revised version in four acts (French text revised by Du Locle, Italian translation by Achille de Lauzières and Angelo Zanardini). »
02 Apr 2020
Un ballo in maschera, a melodramma in three acts.Music composed by Giuseppe Verdi. Libretto by Antonio Somma, based upon the work of Eugène Scribe Gustave III ou Le bal masqué (1833) »
25 Feb 2020
The most notable of all Péricholes of Offenbach’s sentimental operetta is surely the legendary Hortense Schneider who created the role back in 1868 at Paris’ Théâtre des Varietés. Alas there is no digital record. »
03 Feb 2020
John Eliot Gardiner's Schumann series with the London Symphony Orchestra, demonstrate the how Schumann’s Lieder and piano music influenced his approach to symphonic form and his interests in music drama.
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19 Jan 2020
Passion! Pain! Poetry! (but hold the irony . . .) »
18 Dec 2019
Brilliant Emmerich Kálmán’s Ein Herbstmanöver from the Stadttheater, Giessen in 2018, conducted by Michael Hofstetter now on Oehms Classics, in a performing version by Balázs Kovalik. »
04 Nov 2019
Medea: Melodramma tragico in three acts. »
28 Oct 2019
The 68th Wexford Festival Opera, which runs until Sunday 3rd November, is bringing past, present and future together in ways which suggest that the Festival is in good health, and will both blossom creatively and stay true to its roots in the years ahead. »
14 Oct 2019
O Lieb! presents the lieder of Franz Liszt with a distinctive spark from Cyrille Dubois and Tristan Raës, from Aparté. Though young, Dubois is very highly regarded. His voice has a luminous natural elegance, ideal for the Mélodie and French operatic repertoire he does so well. With these settings by Franz Liszt, Dubois brings out the refinement and sophistication of Liszt’s approach to song. »
07 Oct 2019
The final performance of San Francisco Opera’s deeply flawed production of the Gounod masterpiece became, in fact, a triumph — for the Romeo of Pene Pati, the Juliet of Amina Edris, and for Charles Gounod in the hands of conductor Yves Abel. »
23 Sep 2019
From Albion, The Song of Love featuring songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams, with Kitty Whately, Roderick Williams and pianist William Vann. Albion is unique, treasured by Vaughan Williams devotees for rarely heard repertoire from the composer’s vast output, so don’t expect mass market commercial product. Albion recordings often highlight new perspectives. »
16 Sep 2019
Die Tote Stadt, an opera in three acts.Music composed by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957). Libretto by Paul Schott (Julius and E. W. Korngold) after the novel Bruges la morte by Georges Rodenbach. »
06 Sep 2019
Manon Lescaut, dramma lirico in quattro atti »
03 Sep 2019
Elektra: Tragedy in one act. »
20 Aug 2019
Though Luigi Cherubini long outlived the carnage of the French Revolution his 1797 opéra comique [with spoken dialogue] Médée fell well within the “horror opera” genre that responded to the spirit of its time. These days however Médée is but an esoteric and extremely challenging late addition to the international repertory.
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06 Aug 2019
Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer have become an indispensable presence in the contemporary opera world, and their latest premiere, If I Were You, found the duo at the very top of their game. »
27 Jul 2019
If any further proof were needed that Des Moines Metro Opera is at the forefront of operatic excellence in America, their theatrically searing, musically impeccable Wozzeck would cement this assertion. »
23 Jul 2019
From Hyperion, Gerald Finzi choral works with the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, conducted by Stephen Layton. An impressive Magnificat (1952) sets the tone. »
31 May 2019
Superlatives to describe Lise Davidsen’s voice have been piling up
since she won Placido Domingo’s 2015 Operalia competition, blowing
everyone away. She has been called “a voice in a million” and
“the new Kirsten Flagstad.” »
20 May 2019
Why did Jean Sibelius suppress Kullervo (Op. 7, 1892)? There are many theories why he didn’t allow it to be heard after its initial performances, though he referred to it fondly in private. This new recording, from Hyperion with Thomas Dausgaard conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, soloists Helena Juntunen and Benjamin Appl and the Lund Male Chorus, is a good new addition to the ever-growing awareness of Kullervo, on recording and in live performance. »
26 Apr 2019
From Leonardo vs. Michelangelo to Picasso vs. Matisse; from Mozart vs. Salieri to Reich v. Glass: whether it’s Maria Callas vs. Renata Tebaldi or Herbert von Karajan vs. Wilhelm Furtwängler, the history of culture is also a history of rivalries nurtured and reputations derided - more often by coteries and aficionados than by the artists themselves. »
17 Apr 2019
I was decidedly not the only one who thought I was witnessing the birth of a new star, as cover artist Janet Todd stepped in to make a triumphant appearance in the title role of Pacific Opera Project’s absorbing Madama Butterfly. »
14 Apr 2019
To lose one Marguerite may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness. But, with the ROH Gounod’s Faust seemingly heading for ruin, salvation came in the form of an eleventh-hour arrival of a redeeming ‘angel’. »
02 Apr 2019
No wrecked motorcycle (director Harry Kupfer’s 1987 Berlin Orfeo), no wrecked Citroen and black hearse (David Alagna’s 2008 Montpellier Orfée [yes! tenorissimo Roberto Alagna was the Orfée]), no famed ballet company (the Joffrey Ballet) starring in L.A. Opera’s 2018 Orpheus and Eurydice). »
28 Mar 2019
Una cosa rara, ossia Bellezza ed onestà. Dramma giocoso in two acts.Music composed by Vicente Martín y Soler (1754–1806). Libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte from the comedy La luna de la Sierra by Luis Vélez de Guevara. »
24 Mar 2019
Prima la music, poi la parole? It’s the perennial operatic conundrum which has exercised composers from Monteverdi, to Salieri, to Strauss. But, on this occasion we were reminded that sometimes the answer is a simple one: Non, prima le voci! »
06 Mar 2019
Pacific Opera Project’s rollicking new take on The Magic Flute is as much endearing fun as a box full of puppies. »
26 Feb 2019
From the first moments of the recent revival of Sir David McVicar’s production of Elektra by Richard Strauss at Lyric Opera of Chicago the audience is caught in the grip of a rich music-drama, the intensity of which is not resolved, appropriately, until the final, symmetrical chords. »
19 Feb 2019
After D’Oustrac’s striking success as Cassandre in Berlioz Les Troyens, this will reach audiences less familiar with her core repertoire in the baroque and grand opéra. Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été and La mort d’Ophélie, Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder and the Lieder of Franz Liszt are very well known, but the finesse of D’Oustrac’s timbre lends a lucid gloss which makes them feel fresh and pure. »
17 Feb 2019
In contrast to the ‘single-shaming’ advertisement - “To the 12,750 people who ordered a single takeaway on Valentine’s Day. You ok, hun?” - for which the financial services company, Revolut, were taken to task, this Temple Music recital programme on 14th February put the emphasis firmly on partnerships: intimate, impassioned and impetuous. »
06 Feb 2019
This famed murderess worked her magic on Toulouse’s Théâtre du Capitole stage, six dead including her beloved long lost son. It was Victor Hugo’s carefully crafted 1833 thriller recrafted by Italian librettist Felice Romano that became Donizetti’s fragile Lucrezia Borgia.
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27 Jan 2019
The obsessive Russian Dostoevsky’s novel cruelly objectified into music by Czech composer Leos Janacek brutalized into action by Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski beatified by Argentine conductor Alejo Pérez. »
15 Jan 2019
After a series of productions somehow skewed, perverse, and/or pallid, the first Seattle Opera production of the new year comes like a powerful gust of invigorating fresh air: a show squarely, single-mindedly focused on presenting the work of art at hand as vividly and idiomatically as possible. »
24 Dec 2018
My last visit of the year to Wigmore Hall also proved to be one of the best of 2018. American soprano Brenda Rae has been lauded for her superb performances in the lyric coloratura repertory, in the US and in Europe, and her interpretation of the title role in ENO’s 2016 production of Berg’s Lulu had the UK critics reaching for their superlatives. »
01 Dec 2018
The world premiere recording of Wolfgang Rihm's Requiem-Strophen (2015/2016) with Mariss Jansons conducting the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and the Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks with Mojca Erdmann, Anna Prohaska and Hanno Müller-Brachmann, from BR Klassik NEOS. »
29 Nov 2018
And still they come. No year goes by without multiple opportunities to see it; few years now go by without my taking at least one of those opportunities. Indeed, I see that I shall now have gone to Jonathan Miller’s staging on three of its five (!) outings since it was first seen at ENO in 2009. »
19 Nov 2018
“The best music to listen to in a great Gothic church is the polyphony which was written for it, and was calculated for its resonance: this was my approach in the War Requiem - I calculated it for a big, reverberant acoustic and that is where it sounds best.” »
25 Oct 2018
The full title of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem per l’anniversario della morte di Manzoni 22 maggio 1874 attests to its origins, but it was the death of Giacomo Rossini on 13th November 1868 that was the initial impetus for Verdi’s desire to compose a Requiem Mass which would honour Rossini, one of the figureheads of Italian cultural magnificence, in a national ceremony which - following the example of Cherubini’s C minor Requiem and Berlioz’s Grande messe des morts - was to be as much a public and political occasion as a religious one. »
18 Oct 2018
A great big guy in a great big fur coat falls in love with the photo of the worldly daughter of a compulsive gambler. A great big conductor promotes the maelstrom of great big music that shepherds all this to ecstatic conclusion. »
28 Sep 2018
Opera’s triple crown, Donizetti’s tragic queens — Anna Bolena who was beheaded by her husband Henry VIII, their daughter Elizabeth I who beheaded her rival Mary, Queen of Scots and who executed her lover Roberto Devereux. »
15 Sep 2018
In early October 1822, Gioachino Rossini summoned the librettist Gaetano Rossi to a villa (owned by his wife, the soprano Isabella Colbran) in Castenaso, just outside Bologna. Their project: to work on a new opera, which would be premiered during the Carnival in Venice on 3rd February the following year, based on the legend of Queen Semiramide. »
06 Sep 2018
“A telegram, a telegram,/ A telegram from Hollywood./ Inkslinger is the name; And I think that the news is good.” The Western Union Boy’s missive, delivered to Johnny Inkslinger in the closing moments of 1941 ‘choral operetta’ Paul Bunyan and directly connecting the American Dream with success in Tinseltown, may have echoed an offer that Benjamin Britten himself received, for the composer had written expectantly to Wulff Scherchen on 7th February 1939, ‘(((Shshshsssh … I may have an offer from Holywood [sic] for a film, but don’t say a word))).’ Ten days later he wrote again: ‘Hollywood seems a bit nearer - I’ve got an interview with the Producer on Monday’. »
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. »
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. »
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. »
29 Jul 2018
What I am about to write must be taken with the proviso that I have not seen, this year or any other, the rest of Andreas Kriegenburg’s Munich Ring. Friends tell me that would have made little difference, yet I cannot know for certain. »
25 Jul 2018
In the opera house and on the concert platform, we are accustomed to ‘women being men’, as it were. From heroic knights to adolescent youths, women don the armour and trousers, and no-one bats an eyelid. »
16 Jul 2018
This is the one where a very personable devil tells God that mankind is so far gone it isn’t worth his time to bother corrupting it further. »
11 Jul 2018
From the Bayerisches Staatsoper Munich, Wagner Parsifal with a dream cast - René Pape, Jonas Kaufmann and Nina Stemme, Christian Gerhaher and Wolfgang Koch, conducted by Kirill Petrenko, directed by Pierre Audi. The production is vintage Audi - stylized, austere, but solidly thought-through. »
23 Jun 2018
Yes, just when you thought Wotan was the only big guy in town San Francisco Symphony (just across a small street from San Francisco Opera), offered three staged performances of the Mussorgsky masterpiece Boris Godunov in direct competition with San Francisco Opera’s three Ring des Nibelungen cycles. »
03 Jun 2018
Absence makes the heart grow fonder; or does it? In Così fan tutte, who knows? Or rather, what could such a question even mean? »
16 May 2018
This concert might have been re-titled Remembrance of Musical Times Past: the time, that is, when French song, nurtured in the Proustian Parisian salons, began to gain a foothold in public concert halls. But, the madeleine didn’t quite work its magic on this occasion. »
09 May 2018
Majesté, a new recording by Le Poème Harmonique, led by Vincent Dumestre, of music by Michel-Richard de Lalande (1657-1726) new from Alpha Classics. Le Poème Harmonique are regular visitors to London, appreciated for the variety of their programes. On Friday this week, (11/5) they'll be at St John's Smith Square as part of the London Festival of Baroque, with a programme titled "At the World's Courts". »
15 Apr 2018
The Moderate Soprano and the story of Glyndebourne: love, opera and Nazism in David Hare’s moving play »
21 Mar 2018
Long Beach Opera often takes willing audiences on an unexpected journey and such is undeniably the case with its fascinating traversal of The Invention of Morel. »
02 Mar 2018
The big musical set pieces in Turandot require voice, voice, and more voice, and San Diego Opera has gifted us with a world-class cast of singing actors. »
04 Feb 2018
The first thing that struck me in this Wigmore Hall recital was the palpable sincerity of Ilker Arcayürek’s artistry. Sincerity is not everything, of course; what we think of as such may even be carefully constructed artifice, although not, I think, here. »
21 Jan 2018
When did “concept” become a dirty word? In the world of opera, the rot set in innocently, gradually. »
06 Jan 2018
I had never heard of Stefano Secco before receiving this CD. But I see that, at age 34, he already has had a substantial career, singing major roles at important houses throughout Europe and, while I was not paying attention, occasionally in the US. »
22 Dec 2017
Alma Deutscher’s Cinderella is most remarkable for one reason and one reason alone: It was composed by a 12-year old girl. »
24 Nov 2017
Kudos to San Jose Opera for offering up a wholly winning, consistently captivating new production of Puccini’s seldom performed La Rondine.
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07 Nov 2017
The stories surrounding Mozart’s Requiem are well-known.
Dominated by the work in the final days of his life, Mozart claimed that he
composed the Requiem for himself (Landon, 153), rather than for the wealthy
Count Walsegg’s wife, the man who had commissioned it in July 1791. »
28 Oct 2017
If a credible portrayal of the title character in Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto is vital to any performance, the success of Lyric Opera of Chicago’s current, exciting production hinges very much on the memorable court jester and father sung by baritone Quinn Kelsey. »
24 Sep 2017
Back in the LP days, if a singer wanted to show some sophistication, s/he
sometimes put out an album of songs by famous composers set to the poems of one
poet: for example, Phyllis Curtin’s much-admired 1964 disc of Debussy and Fauré
songs to poems by Verlaine, with pianist Ryan Edwards (available now as a CD
from VAI). »
12 Sep 2017
The Bavarian-born Johann Simon Mayr (1763–1845) trained and made his career
in Italy and thus ended up calling himself Giovanni Simone Mayr, or simply
G. S. Mayr. He is best known for having been composition teacher to
Giuseppe Donizetti. »
10 Sep 2017
It must be a Director’s nightmare. After all the months of planning, co-ordinating and facilitating, you are approaching the opening night of a new concert season, at which one of the world’s leading baritones is due to perform, accompanied by a pianist who is one of the world’s leading chamber musicians. And, then, appendicitis strikes. You have 24 hours to find a replacement vocal soloist or else the expectant patrons will be disappointed. »
28 Aug 2017
South African actor, artist, multimedia artist, film and theater, now opera director William Kentridge has taken the world by storm over the past few years. In my experience The Magic Flute in Brussels, The Return of Ulysses (puppets) in San Francisco, The Nose in Aix, Lulu at the Met, Die Winterreise and his “One Man Show” in Aix. And now Wozzeck at the Salzburg Festival. »
22 Aug 2017
Director Molly Smith knew just how to best succeed at staging the evergreen classic Oklahoma! for Glimmerglass Festival. »
05 Aug 2017
Since 1952, the ARD—the organization of German radio
stations—has run an annual competition for young musicians. Winners have
included Jessye Norman, Maurice André, Heinz Holliger, and Mitsuko
Uchida. Starting in 2015, the CD firm GENUIN has offered, as a separate award,
the chance for one of the prize winners to make a CD that can serve as a kind
of calling card to the larger musical and music-loving world. In 2016, the
second such CD award was given to the Aris Quartett (second-prize winner in the
“string quartet” category). »
30 Jul 2017
From Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, to Bruch’s choral-orchestral Odysseus, to Fauré’s Penelope, countless compositions have taken their inspiration from Homer’s Odyssey, perhaps not surprisingly given Homer’s emphasis on the power of music in the Greek world. »
08 Jul 2017
An incredible feat! The Aix Festival opened five operas, all new productions, on five consecutive evenings. The fifth was Francesco Cavalli’s 1655 drama per musica, Erismena! The compulsive intellectualism of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643) long since thrown in the canals, Cavalli dissolves Venetian opera into purest, mindless hedonism. »
25 Jun 2017
That Opera Theatre of Saint Louis fearlessly embraces the cutting edge is once again evidenced by their compelling American premiere of The Trial. »
05 Jun 2017
If opera ultimately is about bel canto, then one need not look any
further than Manitoba Opera’s company premiere of Massenet’s
Werther, its lushly scored portrait of an artist as a young man that
also showcased a particularly strong cast of principal artists. Notably, all
were also marking their own role debuts, as well as this production being the
first Massenet opera staged by organization in its 44-year history. »
21 May 2017
‘Make war not love’, might be a fitting subtitle for Francesco Cavalli’s opera Hipermestra in which the eponymous princess chooses matrimonial loyalty over filial duty and so triggers a war which brings about the destruction of Argos and the deaths of its inhabitants. »
14 May 2017
On May 4, 2017, Los Angeles Opera presented a concert starring Russian soprano Anna Netrebko and her husband, Azerbaijani tenor Yusif Eyvazev. Led by Italian conductor Jader Bignamini, members of the orchestra showed their abilities, too, with a variety of instrumental selections played between the singers’ arias and duets. »
06 May 2017
On Thursday evening April 27, 2017, Los Angeles Opera presented a revival of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. In 2013, director John Caird had given Angelinos a production that made Tosca a full-blooded, intense drama as well as a most popular aria-studded opera. His Floria was a dove among hawks. »
14 Apr 2017
At Phoenix’s Symphony Hall on Friday evening April 7, Arizona Opera offered its final presentation of the 2016-2017 season, Gioachino Rossini’s Cinderella (La Cenerentola). The stars of the show were Daniela Mack as Cinderella, called Angelina in the opera, and Alek Shrader as Don Ramiro. Actually, Mack and Shrader are married couple who met singing these same roles at San Francisco Opera. »
28 Mar 2017
On March 24, 2017, Los Angeles Opera revived its co-production of Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann which has also been seen at the Mariinsky Opera in Leningrad and the Washington National Opera in the District of Columbia. »
14 Mar 2017
On March 10, 2017, San Diego Opera presented an unusual version of Georges Bizet’s Carmen called La Tragédie de Carmen (The Tragedy of Carmen). »
07 Mar 2017
On February 25, 2017, in Tucson and on the following March 3 in Phoenix, Arizona Opera presented its first world premiere, Craig Bohmler and Steven Mark Kohn’s Riders of the Purple Sage. »
25 Feb 2017
Patricia Racette’s Salome is an impetuous teenage princess who interrupts the royal routine on a cloudy night by demanding to see her stepfather’s famous prisoner. Racette’s interpretation makes her Salome younger than the characters portrayed by many of her famous colleagues of the past. This princess plays mental games with Jochanaan and with Herod. Later, she plays a physical game with the gruesome, natural-looking head of the prophet. »
08 Feb 2017
On Feb 3, 2017, Arizona Opera presented Giacomo Puccini’s dramatic opera Madama Butterfly. Sandra Lopez was the naive fifteen-year-old who falls hopelessly in love with the American Naval Officer. »
04 Feb 2017
Fecund Jason, father of his wife Isifile’s twins and as well father of his seductress Medea’s twins, does indeed have a problem — he prefers to sleep with and wed Medea. In this resurrection of the most famous opera of the seventeenth century he evidently also sleeps with Hercules. »
26 Jan 2017
One of Aidan Lang’s first initiatives as artistic director of Seattle
Opera was to encourage his board to formulate a “mission statement”
for the fifty-year old company. The document produced was clear, simple, and
anodyne. Seattle Opera would aim above all to create work appealing both to the
emotions and reason of the audience. »
25 Jan 2017
Deutsche Oper Berlin (DOB) consistently serves up superlatively sung Wagner
productions. This Fall, its productions of Philipp Stölzl's Parsifal and
Kasper Holten's Lohengrin offered intoxicating musical affairs. Annette Dasch, Klaus Florian Vogt, and Peter Seiffert reached for the stars. Even when it
comes down to last minute replacements, the casting is topnotch. »
16 Jan 2017
A welcome addition to Lyric Opera of Chicago’s roster was its recent production of Jules Massenet’s Don Quichotte. »
12 Dec 2016
Let’s start by getting a couple of gripes out of the way. First, the
final act of Die Walküre does not constitute a full-length
concert, even with a distinguished cast and orchestra, and with animated
drawings fluttering on a giant screen. »
06 Dec 2016
Opening night at the Metropolitan is a gleeful occasion even when the
composer is long gone, but December 1st was an opening for a living composer who
has been making waves around the world and is, gasp, a woman — the second woman
composer ever to have an opera presented at the Met. »
24 Nov 2016
If there was ever any doubt that Puccini’s Manon is on a road to nowhere, then the closing image of Jonathan Kent’s 2014 production of Manon Lescaut (revived here for the first time, by Paul Higgins) leaves no uncertainty. »
06 Nov 2016
This year’s Wexford Festival was all about the women. Deluded, dangerous, depressed, deranged, they stood centre-stage and commanded the emotional territory. »
26 Oct 2016
On Thursday evening October 13, Los Angeles Opera transmitted Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth live from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, in the center of the city, to a pier in Santa Monica and to South Gate Park in Southeastern Los Angeles County. My companion and I saw the opera in High Definition on a twenty-five foot high screen at the park. »
12 Oct 2016
Trying to work around Manon Lescaut’s episodic structure,
this new production presents the plot as the dying protagonist’s feverish
hallucinations. The result is a frosty retelling of what is arguably
Puccini’s most hot-blooded opera. Musically, the performance also left
much to be desired. »
24 Sep 2016
On September 22, 2016, Los Angeles Opera presented Darko Tresnjak’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Macbeth. Verdi and Francesco Maria Piave based their opera on Shakespeare’s play of the same name. »
14 Sep 2016
Opera San Jose opened a commendably impassioned Lucia di Lammermoor that sets the company’s bar very high indeed as it begins its new season. »
09 Sep 2016
Kseniia Muslanova from the Russian Federation has won the 3rd annual Elizabeth Connell Prize for aspiring dramatic sopranos held at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in Sydney Australia on 3 September 2016. »
03 Sep 2016
Of all the places in Germany, Oper am Rhein at Theater Duisburg staged an
intriguing American double bill of rarities. An experience that was well worth
the trip to this desolate ghost town, remnant of industrial West Germany. »
17 Aug 2016
On August 4, 2016, soprano Leah Crocetto and accompanist Tamara Sanikidze gave a recital at the Scottish Rite Center in Santa Fe New Mexico. A winner of the Metropolitan Opera Auditions and the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Contest, this year Crocetto was singing Donna Anna in Santa Fe Opera’s excellent Don Giovanni. »
09 Aug 2016
A funny thing happened on the way to Andalusia. »
28 Jul 2016
Can one justly “review” a streamed performance? Probably not.
But however different or diminished such a performance, one can—and
must—bear witness to such an event when it represents a landmark in the
evolution of an art form. »
20 Jul 2016
Someone forgot to tell Central City Opera that it would be difficult to fit Puccini’s (usually) architecturally large Tosca on their small stage.
»
16 Jul 2016
What happens when just everything about an operatic performance goes joyously right?
»
23 Jun 2016
With the New York Premiere of Florencia en el Amazonas, the New York City Opera Steps Out of the Shadows of the Past »
18 Jun 2016
Now that the curtain has long fallen on the third and last performance of
the Ring cycle at the Washington National Opera (WNO), it is safe to
say that the long-anticipated production has been an unqualified success for
the company, director Francesca Zambello, and conductor Philippe Auguin. »
13 Jun 2016
Edouard Lalo (1823-92) is best known today for his instrumental works: the
Symphonie espagnole (which is, despite the title, a five-movement
violin concerto), the Symphony in G Minor, and perhaps some movements from his
ballet Namouna, a scintillating work that the young Debussy adored. »
30 May 2016
It’s not easy for critics to hit the right note when they write about musical collaborations between students and professionals. We have to allow for inevitable lack of polish and inexperience while maintaining an overall high standard of judgment. »
21 May 2016
Anthony Minghella’s production of Madame Butterfly for ENO is
wearing well. First seen in 2005, it is now being aired for the sixth time and is still, as I observed in 2013, ‘a breath-taking visual banquet’. »
14 May 2016
On May 7, 2016, San Diego Opera presented the West Coast premiere of Great Scott, an opera by Terrence McNally and Jake Heggie. McNally’s original libretto pokes fun at everything from football to bel canto period opera. It includes snippets of nineteenth century tunes as well as Heggie's own bel canto writing. »
13 May 2016
A foiled abduction, a castle-threatening inferno, romantic infatuation, guilt-laden near-suicide, gun-shots and knife-blows: Andrea Leone Tottola’s libretto for Vincenzo Bellini’s first opera, Adelson e Salvini, certainly does not lack dramatic incident. »
02 May 2016
Having enjoyed superb singing by a young cast of soloists in Classical
Opera’s UK premiere of Jommelli’s Il Vogoleso the
previous evening, I was delighted that the 2016 Kathleen Ferrier Awards Final
at the Wigmore Hall confirmed the strength and depth of talent possessed by the
young singers studying in and emerging from our academies and conservatoires. »
25 Apr 2016
Dmitry Bertman’s hilarious staging of Rimsky-Korsakov’s political sex-comedy The Golden Cockerel in Düsseldorf. »
20 Apr 2016
In an operatic world crowded with sure-fire bread and butter repertoire, Opera San Jose has boldly chosen to lavish a new production on a dark horse, Andre Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire. »
26 Mar 2016
Evolving in Mahler’s Third: Dudamel and L.A. Philharmonic’s impressive adaption to the Concertgebouw »
16 Mar 2016
‘And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ John Donne’s metaphysical meditation might have made a
fitting sub-title for Richard Jones’s new production of Musorgky’s Boris Godunov at the Royal Opera House — the first
performance in the house of the original 1869 score. »
02 Mar 2016
It is not often that a major work by a forgotten composer gets rediscovered
and makes an enormously favorable impression on today’s listeners. That has
happened, unexpectedly, with Herculanum, a four-act grand opera by
Félicien David, which in 2014 was recorded for the first time. »
22 Feb 2016
In a world opera schedule packed with safe bread-and-butter warhorses, Hawaii Opera Theatre gambled on a Britten rarity and came up smelling as sweet as a tuberose lei. »
18 Feb 2016
Notable first performance of Bellini's opera by ENO, with a striking assumption of the title role from the young American soprano »
08 Feb 2016
Opera Philadelphia deserves congratulations on yet another coup. The company
co-commissioned Cold Mountain, an opera by Jennifer Higdon based on
Gene Scheer’s adaptation of Charles Frazier’s celebrated Civil War
epic. »
01 Feb 2016
I’m not sure that St John’s Smith Square was the most
appropriate venue for Opera Danube’s latest production: Jacques
Offenbach’s satirical frolic, Orpheus in the Underworld. »
22 Jan 2016
Christmas at the Royal Opera House is all about magic, mystery and miracles: as represented by the conjuror’s exploits in The Nutcracker — with its Kingdom of Sweets and Sugar Plum Fairy — or, as in the Linbury Theatre this year, the fantastical adventures of the Firework-Maker’s Daughter, Lila, and her companions — a lovesick elephant, swashbuckling pirates, tropical beasts and Fire-Fiends. »
13 Jan 2016
When, o when, will someone put Peter Sellars and his compendium of clichés
out of our misery? »
22 Dec 2015
Edward Gardner brought all his experience as a choral and opera conductor to bear in this stirring performance of Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time at the Barbican Hall, with a fine cast of soloists, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and BBC Symphony Chorus. »
30 Nov 2015
Vincenzo Bellini composed Norma to a libretto that Felice Romani had fashioned after Alexandre Soumet’s French play, Norma, ossia L'infanticidio (Norma, or The Infanticide). »
14 Nov 2015
The monochrome palette of Picasso’s Guernica and the mural’s anti-war images of suffering dominate Calixto Bieito’s new production of Verdi’s The Force of Destiny for English National Opera. »
05 Nov 2015
Great Scott is a combination of a parody of bel canto opera and an
operatic version of All About Eve. Beloved American diva Arden Scott
(Joyce DiDonato), has discovered the score to a long-lost opera “Rosa
Dolorosa, Figlia di Pompeii” and has become committed to getting the work
revived as a vehicle for her. “Rosa Dolorosa” has grand musical
moments and a hilariously absurd plot. »
31 Oct 2015
Wexford Festival Opera has served up another thought-provoking and musically rewarding trio of opera rarities — neglected, forgotten or seldom performed — in 2015. »
25 Oct 2015
In the first half of the 19th century, Spontini’s La Vestale was a hit. Empress Josephine sponsored its premiere, Parisians heard it hundreds of times, Berlioz raved about it and Wagner conducted it. »
17 Oct 2015
The only thing that is at all radical or even noteworthy about the current Metropolitan Opera season is its imbalance: five Donizetti operas to one Wagner. »
03 Oct 2015
Sounds swirl with an urgent emotionality and meandering virtuosity on Jonas Kaufmann’s new Puccini album—the “real one”, according
to Kaufmann, whose works were also released earlier this year on Decca records, allegedly without his approval. »
29 Sep 2015
LA Opera got its season off to an auspicious beginning with starry revivals
of Gianni Schicchi and Pagliacci. »
21 Sep 2015
Marion Cotillard and Marc Soustrot bring the drama to the sweeping score of Arthur Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au
bûcher, an adaptation of the Trial of Joan of Arc »
14 Sep 2015
The name of Hibla Gerzmava has been famous in the opera world since 1994,
when at age 24 the Abkhazian-Russian soprano won the Grand Prix at Tchaikovsky
International Competition, entering its history as the first and only vocalist
to have been awarded the highest prize. »
12 Sep 2015
BBC Proms Youth Choir shines in a performance notable for its magical transparency »
04 Sep 2015
Disappointing staging mars Alice Coote’s vibrant if wayward musical performance »
23 Aug 2015
The 36th Rossini Opera Festival in Rossini’s Pesaro! La gazza ladra (1817), La gazzetta (1816) and L'inganno felice (1812) — the little opera that made Rossini famous.
»
19 Aug 2015
Unlike the brush fire in a distant neighborhood of the John Crosby Theatre, Santa Fe Opera’s Salome stubbornly failed to ignite. »
07 Aug 2015
This Salzburg Norma is not new news. This superb production was first seen at the Salzburg Festival’s springtime Whitsun Festival in 2013 with this same cast. It will now travel to a few major European cities. »
01 Aug 2015
Puccini’s Manon Lescaut at the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich. Some will scream in rage but in its austerity it reaches to the heart of the opera. »
19 Jul 2015
There are few operas that can rival the visceral impact of a well-staged Jenůfa and Des Moines Metro Opera has emphatically delivered the goods. »
15 Jul 2015
Some time ago in San Francisco there was an Aida starring Luciano Pavarotti, now in Orange it was Carmen starring Jonas Kaufmann. No, not tenors in drag just great tenors whose names simply outshine the title roles. »
07 Jul 2015
If Strauss’s operas of the 1920s receive far too little performing attention, especially in the Anglosphere, those of the 1930s seem to fare worse still. »
30 Jun 2015
Sara Gartland is an emerging singer who brings an enormous talent and a delightful personality to the opera stage. Having sung lighter soprano roles such as Juliette in Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette and Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata, Gartland is now taking on the title role in Leoš Janáček’s dramatic opera Jenůfa. »
21 Jun 2015
Why would an American opera company devote its resources to the premiere of an opera by an Italian composer? Furthermore a parochially Italian story? »
14 Jun 2015
Die Entführung aus dem Serail was Mozart’s first great public success in Vienna, and it became the composer’s most oft performed opera during his lifetime. »
30 May 2015
As the editor of Opera magazine, John Allison, notes in his editorial in the June issue, Donizetti fans are currently spoilt for choice, enjoying a ‘Donizetti revival’ with productions of several of the composer’s lesser known works cropping up in houses around the world. »
22 May 2015
Dystopic vision of Carmen, brought to life by vibrantly gripping performances »
11 May 2015
Topsy Turvy, Mike Leigh’s 1999 film starring Timothy Spall and Jim Broadbent, dramatized the fraught working relationship of William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan; it won four Oscar nominations (garnering two Academy Awards, for costume and make-up) and is a wonderful exploration of the creative process of bringing a theatrical work to life. »
01 May 2015
San Diego Opera, the company that General Manager Ian Campbell had scheduled for demolition, proved that it is alive and singing as beautifully as ever. Its 2015 season was cut back slightly and management has become a bit leaner, but the company celebrated its fiftieth season in fine style with a concert that included many of the greatest arias ever written. »
26 Apr 2015
Kathleen Ferrier may have been one of the world’s finest contraltos but this year’s Kathleen Ferrier Awards Final, held at the Wigmore Hall, was all about lyric sopranos. »
13 Apr 2015
This second revival of Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser’s 2005 production of Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia seems to have every going for it: excellent principals comprising experienced old-hands and exciting new voices, infinite gags and japes, and the visual éclat of Agostino Cavalca’s colour-bursting costumes and Christian Fenouillat’s sunny sets which evoke the style, glamour and ease of La Dolce Vita. »
22 Mar 2015
Julia Noulin-Mérat is the principal designer for the Noulin-Merat Studio, an intrepid New York City production design firm that works in theater, film, and television, but emphasizes opera and immersive site-specific theatre. »
18 Mar 2015
There are some concert programmes which are not just wonderful in their execution but also delight and satisfy because of the ‘rightness’ of their composition. This Wigmore Hall recital by soprano Carolyn Sampson and three period-instrument experts of arias and instrumental pieces by Henry Purcell was one such occasion. »
05 Mar 2015
Saturday, February 28, 2015, was the first night for Los Angeles Opera’s revival of its 2009 presentation of The Barber of Seville, a production by Emilio Sagi, which comes originally from Teatro Real in Madrid in cooperation with Lisbon’s Teatro San Carlos. Sagi and onsite director, Trevor Ross, made comedy the focus of their production and provided myriad sight gags which kept the audience laughing. »
02 Mar 2015
Commenting on her recent, highly acclaimed CD release of late-nineteenth-century song, Chansons Perpétuelles (Naive: V5355), Canadian contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux remarked ‘it’s that intimate side that interests me … I wanted to emphasise the genuinely embodied, physical side of the sensuality [in Fauré]’. »
24 Feb 2015
In a production first seen in Houston several years ago, and now revised by its director John Caird, Puccini’s Tosca has returned to Lyric Opera of Chicago with two casts, partially different, scheduled into March of the present season. »
08 Feb 2015
I wonder whether we need a new way of thinking — and talking — about operatic ‘revivals’. Perhaps the term is more meaningful when it comes to works that have been dead and buried for years, before being rediscovered by subsequent generations. »
04 Feb 2015
Anita Rachvelishvili recently performed the title role in Carmen broadcast by The Metropolitan Opera Live in HD. Here she drops by for a little chat with our Maria Nockin. »
01 Feb 2015
On Tuesday January 27, 2015, San Diego Opera presented Giacomo Puccini's La Boheme. It is the opera with which the company opened in 1965 and a work that the company has faithfully performed every five years since then. »
26 Jan 2015
Figaro 90210 is Vid Guerrerio’s modern version of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo DaPonte’s 1786 opera, The Marriage of Figaro. »
16 Jan 2015
The regal trumpets and sackbuts sound their bold herald and, followed by admiring eyes, the powers of state and church begin their dignified procession along a sloping walkway to assume their lofty positions upon the central dais. »
30 Dec 2014
Stage director Pierre Audi is not one to be strictly representational in his story telling.
»
22 Dec 2014
Daniel Barenboim makes a triumphant departure as direttore musicale del Teatro alla Scala with Beethoven’s operatic masterpiece. »
15 Dec 2014
This Winterreise is the final instalment of Matthias Goerne’s series of Schubert lieder for Harmonia Mundi and it brings the Matthias Goerne Schubert Edition, begun in 2008, to a dark, harrowing close. »
11 Dec 2014
O Maria Deo grata — ‘O Mary, pleasing to God’: so begins Robert Fayrfax’s antiphon, one of several supplications to the Virgin Mary presented in this thought-provoking concert by The Cardinall’s Musick at the Wigmore Hall. »
28 Nov 2014
On November 22, 2014, Los Angeles Opera staged Francesca Zambello’s updated version of Florencia in el Amazonas. »
21 Nov 2014
This third revival of Laurent Pelly’s production of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore needed a bit of a pep up to get moving but once it had been given a shot of ‘medicinal’ tincture things spiced up nicely. »
06 Nov 2014
Whether biblical parable or mythological moralising, it’s all the same really: human hubris, humility, sacrifice and redemption. »
01 Nov 2014
The weather was auspicious for Wexford Festival Opera’s first-night firework display — mild, clear and calm. But, as the rainbow rockets exploded over the River Slaney, even bigger bangs were being made down at the quayside. »
06 Oct 2014
After the triumphs of love, the surprises: Les Paladins, under their director Jérôme Correas, and soprano Sandrine Piau are following their tour of material from their 2011 CD, ‘Le Triomphe de L’amour’, with a new amatory arrangement. »
15 Sep 2014
On Friday evening September 5, 2014, tenor Stephen Costello and soprano Ailyn Pérez gave a recital to open the San Diego Opera season. After all the threats to close the company down, it was a great joy to great San Diego Opera in its new vibrant, if slightly slimmed down form. »
15 Sep 2014
English National Opera’s 2014-15 season kicked off with an ear-piercing orchestral thunderbolt. Brilliant lightning spears sliced through the thick black night, fitfully illuminating the Mediterranean garret-town square where an expectant crowd gather to welcome home their conquering hero. »
25 Aug 2014
This elegant, smartly-paced film turns Gluck’s Orfeo into a Dostoevskian study of a guilt-wracked misanthrope, portrayed by American countertenor Bejun Mehta. »
03 Aug 2014
We see the characters first in two boxes at an opera house. The five singers share a box and stare at the stage. But Konstanze’s eye is caught by a man in a box opposite: Bassa Selim (actor Tobias Moretti), who stares steadily at her and broods in voiceover at having lost her, his inspiration. »
10 Jul 2014
Richard Strauss may be most closely associated with the soprano voice but
this recording of a selection of the composer’s lieder by baritone Thomas
Hampson is a welcome reminder that the rapt lyricism of Strauss’s settings
can be rendered with equal beauty and character by the low male voice. »
02 Jul 2014
‘Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,/ Such shaping fantasies,
that apprehend/ More than cool reason ever comprehends.’ »
30 Jun 2014
‘When two men like us set out to produce a “trifle”, it has to become a very serious trifle’, wrote Hofmannsthal to Strauss during the gestation of their opera about opera. »
18 Jun 2014
Writing in a programme article to accompany this first revival of her 2010 production of Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, director Penny Woolcock remarks upon the opera’s ‘plethora of beautiful arias, duets, choral and orchestral music … and catchy tunes that spawn earworms’. »
09 Jun 2014
Bernarda Fink’s recording of Gustav Mahler’s Lieder is an important new release that includes outstanding performances of the composer’s well-known songs, along with compelling readings of some less-familiar ones. »
29 May 2014
Siberian born baritone, Dmitri Hvorostovsky returned to Dorothy Chandler Hall on May 22nd with a unique all Russian song recital which included songs composed to Pushkin’s poetry and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti. »
22 May 2014
As Athanaël, Placido Domingo created a realistic monk who was ostensibly tempted to disregard his vows. The audience knew that had the courtesan Thaïs lived longer, he would have thrown his immortal soul into the wind. »
19 May 2014
If it is supposed to bring bad luck to even whisper the name of the “Scottish Play” out loud, someone must have screamed Macbeth deafeningly before the performance at Saarbrücken’s State Opera House. »
13 May 2014
Professional opera returns to the Las Vegas Valley June 6th and 8th with performances of one of the best-known comic operas of all time, Gioachino Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia. »
30 Apr 2014
Poulenc’s racy little 1947 confection took stage within Kurt Weill’s peculiar little 1927 singspiel Mahagonny all framed within the current California drought and doomsday predictions of impending global aridity. »
26 Apr 2014
Librettist Leonard Foglia based his elegant and literate text on the late Horton Foote’s play, A Coffin in Egypt, and the opera has the original play’s dramatic punch. »
08 Apr 2014
As one descends the steel steps into the cavernous bunker of Ambika P3, one seems about to enter rather insalubrious realms — just right one might imagine, then, for an opera which delves into the depths of the seedier side of celebrity life. »
30 Mar 2014
Never thought I’d say it but...... »
13 Mar 2014
I met with the embattled artistic director of the Opéra et Orchestre National de Montepellier not to talk about his battles. I simply wanted to know the man who had cast and staged a truly extraordinary Mozart/DaPonte trilogy. »
02 Mar 2014
Billy Budd, portrayed by handsome lyric tenor Liam Bonner, is a charismatic embodiment of innocence. »
24 Feb 2014
This was in almost every respect an excellent performance — which therefore exacerbates the problem lying at the heart, or whatever it is that lies in its place, of the work itself. »
11 Feb 2014
A handsome new production, beautifully staged in Marseille’s fine old opera house cried out for a cast to make the opera bel canto. »
06 Feb 2014
Kasper Holten’s new production of Don Giovanni at the Royal Opera
House risks laying the house’s Director of Opera open to charges of
antiquated mores and misogyny: for he seems to suggest that the women are just
as bad, if not worse, than their seducer — and that a soulful man who seeks
genuine love is likely to find his ‘ideal beloved’ forever out of reach. »
25 Jan 2014
Francesco Bartolomeo Conti (1681-1732) isn’t a name that trips off opera-goers’ tongues; similarly neglected is Conti’s last opera L’Issipile, despite the fact that composer (who was also a theorbo player at the Viennese Imperial Court) was the first of several opera composers to set Metastasio’s libretto. »
22 Jan 2014
Tenor or baritone? Everyone will have their own individual preference about the voice type best suited to Schubert’s Winterreise — and about the manner in which the songs should be performed (narrated, or acted?). »
17 Jan 2014
Harry Christophers and The Sixteen brought Handel's final oratorio, Jephtha, to the Barbican (14 January 2014) preparatory to recording the work. »
08 Jan 2014
Forget Shakespeare, this was distinctly an Otello without the ‘h’. It was Italian melodramma to its core, the collaboration of its metteur en scène Davide Livermore, wunderkind conductor Andrea Battistoni and its Desdemona, Maria Agresto. »
07 Jan 2014
Maybe there can be no bigger feat than making it through Les Contes d’Hoffmann in the Laurent Pelly version without a hitch or two. »
17 Dec 2013
Premiered in Paris in 1872, Jacques Offenbach’s Fantasio received
just ten performances before the opera was withdrawn and its composer found himself on the receiving end of bitter attacks and criticism. »
02 Dec 2013
In its ongoing celebration of Verdi’s centennial year, the Los Angeles Opera offered a new production of Falstaff, the composer’s last and most brilliant opera — brilliant in every scintillating, sparkling sense of the word. »
29 Nov 2013
Acis and Galatea was one of Handel’s most popular works, frequently revived in his life time and beyond. »
22 Nov 2013
It’s been renamed “The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess,” it hails itself as “The American Musical” and further qualifies itself as “The Porgy and Bess for the Twenty-First Century.”
»
05 Nov 2013
With an absorbing production of Peter Grimes and a freshly spontaneous La bohème, Canadian Opera Company has set the bar very high indeed for its current season. »
31 Oct 2013
At this year’s Wexford Festival — the 62nd operatic gathering in this small south-eastern Irish town - the trio of operas on show present many a wretched battle between duty and desire. »
23 Oct 2013
Even before it opened, Royal Opera’s Les vêpres siciliennes was the must-see production of the season. »
20 Oct 2013
Das Liebesverbot: Grosse komische Oper in two acts. »
10 Oct 2013
The company’s new production of the Tchaikovsky masterpiece is cramped and
cheap, leaving the listener longing for a return of the 1997 version »
09 Oct 2013
A rambunctious ensemble on the stage and in the pit. A star conductor. Falstaff showed its stuff as one of the repertory’s greatest masterpieces.
»
07 Oct 2013
Once again, one can only applaud English Touring Opera’s sense of
adventure — and commitment. Its autumn season comprises three Venetian
operas: L’incoronazione di Poppea, Giasone, and
Agrippina, all in translation. »
29 Sep 2013
Last week I enjoyed the opportunity to see Bampton Classical Opera’s
light-hearted, witty production of Mozart’s earliest opera — La finta
semplice — a work which, despite lacking the melodic variety and texture
dynamism of the later operas, is still a remarkably accomplished achievement
for a boy of merely twelve years of age. »
22 Sep 2013
Dolores Claiborne, the heroine of the book Dolores Claiborne (1992), is a figment of the imagination of prolific pulp horror novelist Stephen King. »
09 Sep 2013
Das Rheingold launches what is perhaps the single most ambitious project in opera, Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. »
30 Aug 2013
On a personal level, I feel that Dolores is almost like Emmeline grown up. Their circumstances are not exactly parallel, but they are both women at very different points in their lives whose stories involve dilemmas with life-changing outcomes. »
27 Aug 2013
Recorded at a live performance in 2012, this CD brings together an eclectic
selection of turn-of-the-century orchestral songs and affirms the extraordinary
versatility, musicianship and technical accomplishment of mezzo-soprano
Magdalena Kožená. »
19 Aug 2013
On Wednesday August 7, Santa Fe Opera presented an energetic, fun-loving production of Jacques Offenbach, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy's The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein. »
13 Aug 2013
A massive antique Roman theater where stadium opera is always grand opera and often good opera as well. »
08 Aug 2013
Conductor Leo Hussein, like many of the artists in the production, was making his debut. His take on the story was immediately ascertainable when he played parts of the overture with an earthy tone. This was Violetta’s world, where otherwise refined men wined, dined, and cavorted with the most expensive Parisian courtesans. »
06 Aug 2013
With celebrations of the Verdi Bicentennial in full swing, there have been
many grumblings about the precarious state of Verdi singing in the world’s
major opera houses today. »
30 Jul 2013
Don Giovanni — the coup de coeur. Elektra — a masterpiece. Rigoletto — a hit and a miss. »
23 Jul 2013
That’s Helen (of Troy) by Cavalli, so maybe you are interested after all, though the more engaging experience was The House Taken Over by Vasco Mendonça. »
16 Jul 2013
Although part of a series entitled Cambridge Introductions to Music, Robert Cannon’s wide-ranging, imaginative and thought-provoking survey of opera is certainly not a ‘beginners’ guide’. »
10 Jul 2013
Central City Opera’s meticulous staging of Our Town makes as good a case as is likely possible for Ned Rorem’s operatic version of that classic play.
»
05 Jul 2013
As a companion to their excellent Great Wagner Singers boxed set
compiled and released in celebration of the Wagner Bicentennial, Deutsche
Grammophon have also released Great Wagner Conductors, a selection of
orchestral music conducted by five of the most iconic Wagnerian conductors of
the Twentieth Century, extracted from Deutsche Grammophon’s extensive
archives. »
20 Jun 2013
With the world premiere of Champion, the enterprising Opera Theatre of Saint Louis set the bar very high indeed for the summer festival season. »
16 Jun 2013
What better way for Masonic brothers, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Emmanuel Shikaneder to disseminate Masonic virtues, than through the most popular musical entertainment of their age, a happy ending folktale that features a dragon, enchanting flutes and bells, mixed-up parentage, and a beautiful young princess in distress? »
09 Jun 2013
Just when you thought the protagonist was Hoffmann! Who, rather what stole the show? »
03 Jun 2013
Wagner’s Lohengrin is not an unfamiliar visitor to the UK thanks,
in the main, to Elijah Moshinsky’s perennial production at Covent Garden. »
30 May 2013
Just when you imagine you’ve got the operatic time-line fixed in your mind
in a clean sweep of what goes where and when and how, you hear another work
from another forgotten corner of the repertory that upends one’s conclusions. »
16 May 2013
Parsifal. Bühnenweihfestspiel (“stage dedication play”) in three acts. »
14 May 2013
“Man is an abyss. It makes one dizzy to look into it.” So utters Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, repeating what was also a recurring motif in the playwright’s own letters. »
01 May 2013
It would seem a logical step for the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey to take on
the role of the Composer in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. »
01 May 2013
Hector Berlioz's légende dramatique, La Damnation de Faust, exists somewhere between cantata and opera. Berlioz's flexible attitude to dramatic form made the piece unworkable on the stages of early 19th century Paris and his music is so vivid that you wonder whether the piece needs staging at all. »
16 Apr 2013
The economics of the recording companies dictate much that is not ideal.
Wagner’s operas were not composed as they were in order to permit the
extraction of bleeding chunks, even on those occasions when strophic song forms
do occur. »
31 Mar 2013
“Gli arredi festivi giù cadano infranti, Il popol di Giuda di lutto s’ammanti!”. Verdi’s Nabucco at the Royal Opera House respected the spirit of the opera. »
18 Mar 2013
In the final of scene of Götterdämmerung in a new production at
the Staatsoper Berlin, Brünnhilde appears in a flowing pink gown just as the
music has modulated and penetrates the hall of the Gibichungs, represented by
rows of glowing translucent boxes that preserve the dismembered limbs of their
victims. »
03 Mar 2013
When the soprano Jessica Pratt first arrived in Italy, she had yet to learn the language or sing in a staged opera. »
02 Mar 2013
Samson and Delilah is the only opera by Camille Saint-Saens that is
still regularly performed. He had written two previous operas and would write
several more, along with a long list of instrumental pieces including The
Carnival of the Animals. »
26 Feb 2013
Michael Mayer’s glitzy neon lights production, set in Rat Pack-era Sin City, proves a fitting backdrop for an opera about a curse »
10 Feb 2013
Joyce DiDonato brought her Drama Queens tour to the Barbican Hall last night, 6 February 2012. Accompanied by Il Complesso Barocco, directed by Dmitry Sinkovsky, she enabled us to hear a wide range of arias by mainly Italian baroque composers from Monteverdi to Handel, by way of Porta, Cesti, Orlandini and Hasse. »
06 Feb 2013
Born to a very poor family in 1797, Gaetano Donizetti was lucky enough to become the pupil of Johann Simone Mayr, the Maestro di Capella of his native city, who recognized his talent and made sure he received appropriate instruction. »
01 Feb 2013
The Met’s opulent and well-sung Maria Stuarda cannot overcome its insipid libretto. »
15 Jan 2013
Once a mainstay of the repertory L’Italiana in Algeri now usually gives way to Il Turco in Italia when an opera company wants to give Il barbiere di Sivigllia and La cenerentola a rest. »
23 Dec 2012
Well, so many don’t nowadays, it appears to me, judging by the critical
reception of Robert le Diable at the ROH. Rum-ti-tum? We recall
Macbeth, Rigoletto, Trov and even Trav being characterised
thus, popular fare but risible or blush- making, yet those works now command
the highest respect. »
14 Dec 2012
This recital, which focused on a narrowly specific time and place —
1888-1933 Vienna — paradoxically illuminated not only the musical scope and
richness of that epoch but also, as Renée Fleming notes in her prefatory programme article, the extraordinary extent of the diversity, transformation and flux, both historical and cultural, that characterised the era. »
05 Dec 2012
They say that there’s nothing worse than a musically-obtuse staging of any opera to put a rookie opera-goer off a composer (or even opera itself) for life. »
18 Nov 2012
Who is Patricia Racette? Sexually ripe Nedda, maternal Cio-Cio-San, neurotic Sister Angelica? But now the jealous Tosca? And without question Mme. Racette has again proven herself the Puccini heroine par excellence of this moment. »
10 Nov 2012
When tenor Michael Spyres takes the stage at Carnegie Hall on December 5th, he will be in heady company. »
10 Nov 2012
After a slow, long period of gestation, commencing with a short dramatization at Reigate Priory in 1906 and spanning more than 40 years, the first performance of Vaughan Williams’ The Pilgrim’s Progress took place at Covent Garden on 26 April 1951, as part of the Festival of Britain. »
24 Oct 2012
Parsifal, with its heavy dose of religiosity and strains of racial supremacy, remains at once the most mystical and historically burdened of Wagner’s operas. »
17 Oct 2012
Labelled a “parable of oppression” by the late musicologist, Philip Brett, Britten’s provincial comedy, Albert Herring, is a tough nut to crack. »
12 Oct 2012
Forget Herman Melville, forget struggling with deep human complexities. At least those that possessed nineteenth century Americans. »
09 Oct 2012
Give me good verses, I’ll give you good music, said Bellini to his librettist Felice Romani. Give me a good director and I’ll give you good opera surely thought San Francisco Opera general director David Gockley. »
27 Sep 2012
The venerable Santa Fe Opera served up a richly eclectic mix of high-caliber offerings that surely is one of their best festivals in recent seasons.
»
28 Aug 2012
It is difficult to speak with excessive enthusiasm of the programming of a Salzburg Festival that included both Carmen and La bohème, though it would subsequently be redeemed in part by a staging of Die Soldaten. »
20 Aug 2012
When announced in November, this was trailed as the original version of Ariadne auf Naxos, a rare treat indeed. »
15 Jul 2012
Elijah Moshinsky’s Otello, first seen at Covent Garden in 1987,
and revived numerous times with a range of stellar casts, may be traditional
and conservative, even — excepting the thunderous opening storm scene —
somewhat uninventive; »
09 Jul 2012
Not about tattoo art, not an evocation of the Holocast, and let us not even try to put our finger on what it is about. »
02 Jul 2012
Embodying a range of iconic female characters from history, literature and song — both the ‘good’ and the ‘not-so-good’ — Susan Graham delivered a wonderfully suave and entertaining performance before a delighted Wigmore Hall audience. »
27 Jun 2012
A sensational Les Troyens at the Royal Opera House, London. Berlioz, who understood theatrical gestures so well, builds his opera around the most audacious dramatic device in ancient history: the Trojan Horse. »
15 Jun 2012
A feast for the eyes, a feast for the ears, a Flute from America’s heartland that goes directly to your heart. »
08 Jun 2012
There are many different ways to analyze the health of New York City. My personal measurements judge the town thus: How many aspiring artsy kids are forced to share a single apartment in an outer borough while they “find themselves” and how many small but immensely able opera companies are functional at any given time. »
04 Jun 2012
Detlev Glanert’s Caligula at the ENO shows how powerful modern opera can be. Caligula was a tyrant, but this opera isn’t sensationalist. »
26 May 2012
Director David Freeman tells why this is an event worth experiencing in the Olympic year. »
19 May 2012
It is not long into Act One of Mignon at Geneva’s Grand Theatre when Diana Damrau glides on stage as Philine, commands our rapt attention, and sweeps all before her. »
26 Apr 2012
Massenet’s Manon succeeds in the theater when the soprano has
a real sense of the role and how she wants to present it. »
19 Apr 2012
I have to rethink my week, because somehow I have to get to see Opera Atelier’s production of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Armide again. »
13 Apr 2012
Released in late 2011, Deutsche Grammophon’s DVD of the new staging of Berg’s Lulu at the Gran Teatro del Liceu, Barcelona is an excellent contribution to the discography of this fascinating opera. »
31 Mar 2012
The novels of Sinclair Lewis once shot across the American literary skies like comets, alarming and fascinating readers of that era, but their tails didn’t extend far behind them. »
19 Mar 2012
You can’t keep a good opera buffa down. And Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale is about as good as opera buffa gets. »
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. »
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.
»
03 Feb 2012
To the dismay of New York opera fans, the original Metropolitan Opera House,
located at Broadway and 39th Street, was to be torn down and replaced by a new hall
a mere 30 blocks away. »
25 Jan 2012
War and destruction is everywhere these days, not least in Pesaro where Graham Vick staged a lethal Mosé in Egitto last August, nor less so in San Francisco where baritone Thomas Hampson perished as Rick Rescorla in Heart of a Soldier last September. »
30 Dec 2011
I spoke with Vivica Genaux in December 2011, when she stopped in New York at
the end of one of her concert tours. »
19 Dec 2011
Jean-Philippe Rameau, an organist and music theoretician, was active for much of his life in musical centers distant from the cultural juggernaut of Paris. »
13 Dec 2011
Straight to the point: Netherlands Opera has mounted as luminous and emotionally engaging an Idomeneo as is imaginable. »
02 Dec 2011
At one point in The Met’s history, Faust was performed so frequently that one critic in mocking reference to Wagner’s opera house at Bayreuth coined the theater Faustophilhaus. »
25 Nov 2011
No cuts, not a single one, nearly four hours of non-stop arias, and its only hit tune happens within the first five minutes. »
15 Nov 2011
Deborah Warner’s new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is an evocative and lyrical depiction of elegiac passion. »
01 Nov 2011
It’s very unusual for the Met these days—or any major opera house, in any era—to present a glossy new production with two different stars in the leading role. »
23 Oct 2011
‘Erotic oratorio’ is the odd-sounding definition devised by modern scholars, such as Howard E. Smither, for those pious music dramas employing sex-laden plots from the Bible, the Apocrypha or the lives of Saints in order to give the audience moral instruction in a quasi-operatic, if generally unstaged, form. »
12 Oct 2011
Should I wait until the end of this review to tell you how much fun, how much of a theatrical whoopee cushion Robert Wilson’s production of Die Dreigroschenoper has been at BAM last week? »
28 Sep 2011
Bad news travels fast. Though you are about to read another version of how American diva Renée Fleming failed to bring Lucrezia Borgia alive, let us begin by discussing a few other things you already know. »
21 Sep 2011
What do a ferociously violent melodrama, an ecstatic spiritual revelation and an ironic black farce have in common? »
06 Sep 2011
Bochum’s Jahrhunderthalle, a massive, re-purposed industrial building, seemed an unlikely location to contain and frame the transcendent, unbounded spiritual journey of Wagner’s masterpiece Tristan und Isolde. »
06 Sep 2011
Superstitions surround theatrical productions of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy. »
27 Aug 2011
Musical excellence was the centerpiece of three of Santa Fe Opera’s annual offerings. »
20 Aug 2011
Gaetano Donizetti is arguably the established opera composer with the highest ratio of failures to successes. »
13 Aug 2011
Great characters are at the center of all operatic masterpieces, yet opera almost never treads into “operatic biography” territory. »
01 Aug 2011
An appreciation of La traviata plus La clemenza di Tito and Le Nez/The Nose at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. »
22 Jul 2011
Athalia: Oratorio (sacred drama) in 3 acts »
07 Jul 2011
By 1825, as Rossini’s operatic vein was approaching exhaustion, the
Neapolitan Saverio Mercadante ranked as a front-runner for his succession
alongside Bellini and Donizetti; much more so, however, in the field of serious
drama than in opera buffa. »
06 Jul 2011
Some of the experts said it was the best Ring ever, others merely
said it was one of the best (these were lecturers at a Wagner Society
symposium). »
22 Jun 2011
Will Crutchfield made his name as a writer and musicologist in the mid-1980s, becoming the youngest music critic in the history of The New York Times. »
06 Jun 2011
The U.S. premiere of Hans Werner Henze’s Phaedra at the Opera Company of Philadelphia may well be the most important and ambitious new work presented by any American company this season. »
22 May 2011
Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska certainly knows how to make the most
of every opportunity. »
18 May 2011
Gluck’s Orfeo is, intentionally, free of clutter. If you cut
out the scenes of balletic rejoicing just before the finale (and I can’t
think of any good reason not to do so), it’s less than ninety minutes of
music. »
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. »
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. »
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. »
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. »
24 Mar 2011
Opera is alive and well in Sarasota. “It feels like it did before,” says Communications Officer for Sarasota Opera Patricia Horwell. »
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? »
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. »
18 Feb 2011
From the sublime (Parsifal, the night before) to the not-even-ridiculous. »
07 Feb 2011
Preparing for the Met premier of Nixon in China, I resolved to
forget—or place on hold—everything I remembered, or thought I
remembered, about the real persons who are characters in this opera, »
31 Jan 2011
Elizabeth Futral has established herself as one of the major coloratura sopranos in the world today. With her stunning vocalism and vast dramatic range, she has embraced a diverse repertoire that includes Vivaldi, Handel, Mozart, Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, Verdi, Glass, and Previn. »
16 Jan 2011
They have been fiddling with Luc Bondy’s staging of Tosca. Scarpia doesn’t masturbate on the Madonna; he just sort of pinches her erotically. »
31 Dec 2010
Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy’s impressionist drama closely
based on Maeterlinck’s eerie, symbolist play, is not a terribly vocal opera; it calls more for the subtlety of art song style than the belting of great divas and divos. »
19 Dec 2010
La Fanciulla del West is Puccini’s love letter to an America that had acclaimed him joyously on his triumphant visit of 1907 to attend the Met premieres of Manon Lescaut and Madama Butterfly. »
11 Dec 2010
The opening night of the new season at Teatro alla Scala Milan is a gala event, the most glamorous in the entire Italian opera year. »
03 Dec 2010
It may be as well to put matters in context by saying that Don Carlo is a
favorite opera of mine (and of all Verdi lovers), and that I found the Met’s new staging highly satisfactory, vocally very good if less than top flight, orchestrally thrilling—and that I hope to catch it again this
season. (Interesting rumors have been heard about the alternate tenor.) »
12 Nov 2010
Lucrezia Borgia: Melodramma in a prologue and two acts. »
07 Nov 2010
Minnesota Opera’s recent production of Rossini’s La Cenerentola certainly is a fantastical, comical portrayal of the classical fairy tale. »
24 Oct 2010
The last curtain call at the opera usually goes to the title character, the star of the work just performed. At the end of the Met’s new Boris Godunov, the calls begin with a solo call for the title character, René Pape as Boris, and conclude with one for the Metropolitan Opera Chorus all by themselves. »
16 Oct 2010
Dame Joan Sutherland, ‘La Stupenda’, sang her first Gilda at Covent
Garden in 1957 under the baton of Sir Edward Downes, and sang the role many times and to great acclaim on the ROH stage. »
08 Oct 2010
It will be no surprise to me, a year or five from now, when someone falls to
her or his death from the guy-wires that configure so much of Robert
Lepage’s new state-of-the-art (ah! But which art?) production of Der
Ring des Nibelung. »
26 Sep 2010
The Royal Opera is hardly renowned for its commitment to baroque opera, and
even the great Handel still gets short shrift in his adopted city’s major
house. »
13 Sep 2010
This season Santa Fe Opera offered new productions that ranged from standard
repertoire (Madame Butterfly and The Magic Flute) to a world
premiere (Lewis Spratlan’s Life is a Dream) with The Tales
of Hoffmann and Albert Herring falling somewhere amidst. »
01 Sep 2010
La Esmeralda: Opéra in four acts. »
12 Aug 2010
Ernani: Dramma lirico in four parts. »
14 Jul 2010
Oberst Chabert (Colonel Chabert): Tragic opera in 3 acts. »
23 Jun 2010
Otello: Dramma lirico in four acts.Music composed by Giuseppe Verdi. Libretto by Arrigo Boito after The Tragedie of Othello, the Moore of Venice by William Shakespeare. »
21 May 2010
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a comedy in five acts with incidental music. »
24 Apr 2010
Le Marchand de Venise (“The Merchant of Venice”): Opéra in three acts. »
17 Mar 2010
Gli Equivoci (The Comedy of Errors): Opera in two acts. »
07 Feb 2010
Der Sturm: Opera in three acts »
30 Jan 2010
The Fairy-Queen: Semi-opera in five acts. »
18 Jan 2010
Macbeth: Melodramma in quattro parti. »
03 Jan 2010
Das Liebesverbot: Grosse komische Oper in two acts. »
13 Dec 2009
Falstaff: Commedia lirica in three acts. »
30 Nov 2009
Hamlet: Opéra in five acts.Music composed by Ambroise Thomas. Libretto by Michel Carré and Jules Barbier after The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare. »
15 Nov 2009
Otello, ossia Il moro di Venezia (‘Othello, or The Moor of Venice’): Dramma in three acts. »
18 Oct 2009
Béatrice et Bénédict: Opéra comique in two acts »
11 Oct 2009
Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor), a comical-fantastical opera in three acts with dance. »
29 Sep 2009
Otello: Dramma lirico in four acts.Music composed by Giuseppe Verdi. Libretto by Arrigo Boito after The Tragedie of Othello, the Moore of Venice by William Shakespeare. »
06 Sep 2009
Werther: Drame lyrique en 4 actes et 5 tableauxMusic composed by Jules Massenet. Libretto by Edouard Blau, Paul Milliet and Georges Hartmann based on Die Leiden des jungen Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe »
23 Aug 2009
Mignon: Opéra comique in three acts. »
03 Aug 2009
Scenen aus Goethes Faust (op. WoO 3 ) [also known as Szenen aus Goethes „Faust“], oratorio in three parts with seven scenes. »
26 Jul 2009
Faust, Opéra en cinq actes. »
12 Jul 2009
Faust, Opéra en cinq actes. »
15 Jun 2009
Turandot, dramma lirico in three acts. »
10 Jun 2009
I masnadieri [The bandits]: Melodramma in four parts
»
17 May 2009
The Maid of Orléans: [Orleanskaya deva]: Opera in four acts »
11 May 2009
Guglielmo Tell: Melodramma tragico in four acts »
03 May 2009
Maria Stuarda: Tragedia lirica in two or three acts. »
26 Apr 2009
Don Carlo: Opera in four acts. »
19 Apr 2009
Luisa Miller: Melodramma tragico in three acts. »
12 Apr 2009
Götterdämmerung: Third day of Der Ring des Nibelungen in a prologue and three acts. »
06 Apr 2009
Siegfried: Second day of Der Ring des Nibelungen in three acts. »
29 Mar 2009
Die Walküre: First day of Der Ring des Nibelungen in three acts.
»
22 Mar 2009
Vorabend (preliminary evening) of Der Ring des Nibelungen, in four scenes. »
15 Mar 2009
Il Barbiere di Siviglia [Almaviva, ossia L’inutile precauzione (‘Almaviva, or The Useless Precaution’)]: Commedia in two acts. »
08 Mar 2009
Medea (Médée): Opéra comique in three acts. »
01 Mar 2009
La sonnambula, Melodramma in due atti »
22 Feb 2009
Tosca: A melodrama in three acts. »
15 Feb 2009
Armida, Dramma per musica in tre atti. »
08 Feb 2009
La Traviata: Melodramma in three acts.
»
01 Feb 2009
Un ballo in maschera: Melodramma in three acts »
25 Jan 2009
Il Pirata: Melodramma in two acts. »
18 Jan 2009
Norma: Tragedia lirica in two acts. »
11 Jan 2009
Lucia di Lammermoor: Opera in three acts. »
04 Jan 2009
Turandot, dramma lirico in three acts. »
28 Dec 2008
Gianni Schicchi: Opera in one act (no. 3 of Il trittico) »
21 Dec 2008
Suor Angelica: Opera in one act (no.2 of Il trittico). »
14 Dec 2008
Il Tabarro [The Cloak]: Opera in one act (no.1 of Il Trittico). »
07 Dec 2008
La Rondine: Commedia lirica in three acts. »
01 Dec 2008
La Fanciulla del West: Opera in three acts. »
23 Nov 2008
La Fanciulla del West: Opera in three acts. »
16 Nov 2008
Madama Butterfly, opera in two acts. »
09 Nov 2008
Tosca: A melodrama in three acts. »
02 Nov 2008
La Bohème, opera in four acts.
Music composed by Giacomo Puccini. Libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi lllica, based
on episodes from Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème. »
26 Oct 2008
Intermezzo: Bürgerliche Komödie with symphonic interludes in two acts.
»
20 Oct 2008
Salome, Musikdrama in one act. »
05 Oct 2008
Capriccio: Konversationsstück für Musik in one act. »
21 Sep 2008
Arabella: Lyrische Komödie in three acts »
14 Sep 2008
Die ägyptische Helena: Oper in two acts. »
07 Sep 2008
Die ägyptische Helena: Oper in two acts. »
01 Sep 2008
Die Frau ohne Schatten: Oper in three acts »
24 Aug 2008
Die Frau ohne Schatten: Oper in three acts »
17 Aug 2008
Der Rosenkavalier (‘The Knight of the Rose’): Komödie für Musik in 3 acts. »
10 Aug 2008
Der Rosenkavalier (‘The Knight of the Rose’): Komödie für Musik in 3 acts. »
04 Aug 2008
Die Entführung aus dem Serail: Singspiel in 3 Acts. »
27 Jul 2008
Die Entführung aus dem Serail: Singspiel in 3 Acts. »
20 Jul 2008
Idomeneo, rè di Creta: Dramma per musica in tre atti (K. 366). »
13 Jul 2008
Idomeneo, rè di Creta: Dramma per musica in tre atti (K. 366). »
06 Jul 2008
Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti (K. 588). Opera buffa in two acts. »
30 Jun 2008
Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti (K. 588). Opera buffa in two acts. »
22 Jun 2008
Die Zauberflöte: Singspiel in two acts, K. 620 »
15 Jun 2008
Die Zauberflöte: Singspiel in two acts, K. 620 »
08 Jun 2008
La Clemenza di Tito: Opera seria in two acts, K621. »
01 Jun 2008
La Clemenza di Tito: Opera seria in two acts, K621. »
25 May 2008
Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro): Opera buffa in four acts, K492 »
18 May 2008
Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro): Opera buffa in four acts, K492 »
11 May 2008
Il dissoluto punito ossia il Don Giovanni (K. 527): Drama giocoso in two acts »
04 May 2008
Il dissoluto punito ossia il Don Giovanni (K. 527): Dramma giocoso in two acts »
27 Apr 2008
Chérubin: Comédie chantée in three acts. »
21 Apr 2008
Marie-Magdeleine: Drame sacré in three acts and four scenes »
13 Apr 2008
Le Cid: opéra in four acts and ten tableaux. »
06 Apr 2008
Esclarmonde: Opéra romanesque in four acts and eight tableaux. »
30 Mar 2008
Cendrillion, Conte de Fées in 4 ActsMusic composed by Jules Massenet (1842–1912). Libretto by Henri Cain after Perrault. »
16 Mar 2008
Manon: Opéra comique in 5 acts and 6 tableaux »
09 Mar 2008
Thaïs: Comédie lyrique in three acts and seven scenes. »
03 Mar 2008
Fetonte: Dramma per musica in three acts. »
25 Feb 2008
La Partenope: Dramma per musica in three acts. »
19 Feb 2008
Medea (Médée): Opéra comique in three acts. »
10 Feb 2008
Andromaca: Dramma per musica in three acts. »
03 Feb 2008
Ermione: Azione tragica in two acts. »
27 Jan 2008
Ippolito ed Aricia: Tragedia in five acts. »
20 Jan 2008
Idomeneo: Opera seria in three acts. »
13 Jan 2008
Paride ed Elena: Dramma per musica in five acts. »
10 Jan 2008
Orphée: Opera in four acts.
Music composed by Christoph Willibald Gluck (arranged by Hector Berlioz, 1859).
Libretto by Ranieri de' Calzabigi »
26 Dec 2007
Alceste, ou Le triomphe d’Alcide: Tragédie en musique in a prologue and five acts. »
17 Dec 2007
Alceste: Tragédie opéra in three acts. »
06 Dec 2007
Oedipe à Colone: Tragédie lyrique in three acts. »
18 Nov 2007
Fedra: Dramma per musica in two acts. »
11 Nov 2007
Les Troyens: Grand opéra in five acts. »
28 Oct 2007
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Music drama in three acts. »
21 Oct 2007
Der Schauspieldirektor [The Impresario], Singspiel in one act, K486. »
07 Oct 2007
Divertimento teatrale in one act. »
23 Sep 2007
Andrea Chénier, an opera in four acts. »
16 Sep 2007
La figlia del reggimento [La Fille du régiment (‘The Daughter of the Regiment’)], Opéra comique in two acts. »
09 Sep 2007
La Bohème, opera in four acts.
Music composed by Giacomo Puccini. Libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi lllica, based
on episodes from Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème. »
02 Sep 2007
Giovanna d’Arco, dramma lirico in a prologue and three acts.Music composed by Giuseppe Verdi. Libretto by Temistocle Solera. »
27 Aug 2007
Der Templer und die Jüdin, Grosse romantische Oper in three acts. »
19 Aug 2007
Iphigénie en Tauride, Tragédie Lyrique in four acts. »
04 Jul 2007
The Golden Cockerel [Zolotoy petushok (Le coq d’or)], a dramatized fable with a prologue, three acts and an epilogue. »
24 Jun 2007
Die Schöpfung, Oratorium in drei TeilenMusic composed by Franz Joseph Haydn. Libretto by Gottfried van Swieten based on selections from the Book of Genesis and Paradise Lost by John Milton. »
17 Jun 2007
Theodora, oratorio in three acts (HWV 68). »
10 Jun 2007
Solomon, an oratorio in three acts (HWV 67). »
04 Jun 2007
Israel in Egypt, an oratorio in two parts (HWV 54). »
28 May 2007
Judas Maccabaeus, a sacred drama in three acts (HWV 63). »
20 May 2007
Saul, oratorio in three acts (HWV 53). »
17 May 2007
Jephtha, oratorio in three parts (HWV 70). »
08 May 2007
Hérodiade, opera in four acts. »
02 May 2007
Salome, Musikdrama in one act. »
21 Apr 2007
Nabucco (Nabucodonosor), Drama lirico in four parts. »
15 Apr 2007
Mosè (Moïse et Pharaon, ou Le passage de la Mer Rouge), Melodramma in four acts »
09 Apr 2007
Samson et Dalila, grand opera in three acts and four tableaux. »
03 Apr 2007
Falstaff, commedia lirica in three acts. »
25 Mar 2007
Rigoletto, melodramma in three acts. »
18 Mar 2007
Mefistofele, Opera in un prologo, quattro atti e un epilogoMusic and libretto by Arrigo Boito (1842-1918), based on Faust: Eine Tragödie by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe »
27 Feb 2007
Opéra comique in four acts.Music composed by Georges Bizet (1838-1875). Libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy after Prosper Mérimée’s novella, Carmen. »
20 Feb 2007
Aida, opera in four acts. »
11 Feb 2007
I Pagliacci, dramma in a prologue and two acts. »
05 Feb 2007
Cavalleria Rusticana, melodramma in one act. »
28 Jan 2007
La Bohème, opera in four acts.
Music composed by Giacomo Puccini. Libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi lllica, based
on episodes from Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème. »
15 Jan 2007
Madama Butterfly, opera in two acts. »
07 Jan 2007
Andrea Chénier, an opera in four acts. »
25 Dec 2006
Vier Letzte Lieder [Four Last Songs] »
22 Dec 2006
Les Nuits d'Été (The Nights of Summer), Op. 7. »
10 Dec 2006
Fünf Gedichte für eine Frauenstimme (“Wesendonck Lieder”) [Five Poems for a Female Voice] »
01 Dec 2006
Hans Heiling, romantic opera in three acts and prologue.Music composed by Heinrich Marschner (1795-1861). Libretto by Philipp Eduard Devrient, based on Bohemian legends. »
28 Nov 2006
Robert Le Diable, grand opera in five acts. Music by Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864). Libretto by Eugène Scribe and Germaine Delavigne. »
19 Nov 2006
Der Vampyr, romantic opera in two acts in the version by Hans Pfitzner (1924). »
12 Nov 2006
Don Sebastiano, Italian translation of Dom Sébastien, roi de Portugal, a grand opera in five acts. »
10 Nov 2006
Les Huguenots, an opera in five acts.Music composed by Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864). Libretto by Eugéne Scribe and Emile Deschamps. »
27 Oct 2006
Don Carlo, an opera in five acts. Music composed by Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901). Libretto by Joseph Méry and Camille Du Locle after Friedrich von Schiller’s dramatic poem Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien. French text revised by Du Locle, Italian translation by Achille de Lauzières and Angelo Zanardini. »
22 Oct 2006
Turandot, dramma lirico in three acts. »
15 Oct 2006
Rita ou Le mari battu, a comic opera in one act.Music composed by Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848). Libretto by Gustave Vaëz. »
08 Oct 2006
Introduction: Philip Gossett is one of those rarities in academia: a scholar of the first order and a consummate teacher. »
01 Oct 2006
Tito Manlio (Titus Manlius), dramma per musica in 3 acts. Music composed by Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) based on a libretto by Matteo Noris (? – 1714). »
24 Sep 2006
I vespri siciliani, grand opera in five acts. Italian edition of Les vépres siciliennes. »
13 Aug 2006
Tristan und Isolde, Handlung (drama) in three acts.Music and libretto by Richard Wagner. »
30 Jul 2006
La Gioconda, dramma lirico in four acts.Music composed by Amilcare Ponchielli (1834–1886). Libretto by Arrigo Boito (under the pseudonym Tobia Gorrio), based upon Victor Hugo's
Angelo, Tyrant of Padua (1835). »
25 Jul 2006
Un bain au sérail by Théodore Chassériau (1849)Musée du Louvre »
08 Jul 2006
Opéra comique in four acts.Music composed by Georges Bizet (1838-1875). Libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy after Prosper Mérimée’s novella, Carmen. »
23 Jun 2006
Nestling artistically in a bowl, carefully arranged and lit to suit the camera early in the programme, the testicles seemed to glow softly with their hidden history, their inherent potential and, now, their very lack of future. »
19 Jun 2006
Der fliegende Holländer. Romantic opera in 3 acts.Music composed by Richard Wagner. Libretto by the composer. »
11 Jun 2006
Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti (K. 588). Opera buffa in two acts.Music composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791). Libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. »
08 Jun 2006
La Cenerentola, ossia La bontà in trionfo. Dramma giocoso in two acts.Music composed by Gioacchino Rossini (1792–1868). Libretto by Jacopo Ferretti after Perrault. »
21 May 2006
Poliuto, Tragedia lirica in three acts.Music composed by Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848). Libretto by Salvatore Cammarano, after the tragedy Polyeucte (1640) by Pierre Corneille. »
18 May 2006
Alceste. Tragedia in three acts (Italian version).Alceste. Tragédie opéra in three acts (French version). »
15 May 2006
Orfeo ed Euridice. Azione teatrale in three acts (Italian version).Orphée et Eurydice. Tragédie opéra in three acts (French version). »
30 Apr 2006
Giulio Cesare in Egitto (HWV 17), Drama in three acts.Music composed by Georg Friedrich Handel (1685–1759). Libretto by Nicola Francesco Haym after an earlier libretto by Giacomo Francesco Bussani. »
20 Apr 2006
I puritani, opera seria in three actsMusic composed by Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835). Libretto by Carlo Pepoli from Têtes rondes et Cavaliers (1833) by Jacques Ancelot and Xavier Saintine. »
17 Apr 2006
Norma: Tragedia lirica in due atti »
09 Apr 2006
La sonnambula, Melodramma in due attiMusic composed by Vincenzo Bellini (1801–1835). Libretto by Felice Romani, based on La Sonnambule ou L'arrivée d'un nouveau Seigneur (1827) by Eugène Scribe. »
26 Mar 2006
Die verkaufte Braut (The Bartered Bride; Prodaná nevěsta)Comic opera in three acts.Music composed by Bedřich Smetana. Libretto by Karel Sabina »
23 Mar 2006
Don Pasquale, Dramma buffo in three acts.
Music by Gaetano Donizetti. Libretto by Giovanni Ruffini and the
composer after Angelo Anelli’s libretto for Stefano Pavesi’s Ser
Marcantonio (1810), which was derived from Epicœne or The
Silent Woman by Ben Jonson (1609). »
20 Mar 2006
Roméo et Juliette, Opéra en cinq actes
Music composed by Charles François Gounod. Libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, based on the play Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. »
12 Mar 2006
Il Matrimonio Segreto, Melodramma giocoso in two acts.Music composed by Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801). Libretto by Giovanni Bertati after The Clandestine Marriage (1766) by George Colman the Elder and David Garrick. »
02 Mar 2006
Oberon, Romantic opera in three actsMusic by Carl Maria von Weber. Libretto by James Robinson Planché after Oberon by Christoph Martin Wieland and the 13th-century French romance Huon de Bordeaux »
18 Feb 2006
Der Freischütz, Romantische Oper in drei Aufzügen.Music composed by Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826). Libretto by Friedrich Kind. »
15 Feb 2006
Armida, Dramma per musica in tre atti. »
12 Feb 2006
Euryanthe, Romantische Oper in drei AufzügenMusic composed by Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826). Libretto by Wilhelmina Christiane von Chézy. »
22 Jan 2006
Parsifal. Bühnenweihfestspiel ("stage dedication play") in three acts.Music and libretto by Richard Wagner. »
15 Jan 2006
La clemenza di Tito. Opera seria in due atti (K. 621).Music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Libretto by Caterino Mazzolà based on a text by Pietro Metastasio. »
08 Jan 2006
Idomeneo, rè di Creta. Dramma per musica in tre atti (K. 366).Music composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Libretto by Giovanni Battista Varesco after Idomenée by Antoine Danchet. »
06 Jan 2006
Requiem in D Minor (K. 626)Music composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Text based on the Mass for the Dead (Requiem Mass). »
01 Jan 2006
Die Schöpfung, Oratorium in drei TeilenMusic composed by Franz Joseph Haydn. Libretto by Gottfried van Swieten based on selections from the Book of Genesis and Paradise Lost by John Milton. »
28 Dec 2005
Faust, Opéra en cinq actesMusic composed by Charles Gounod. Libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré after Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe »
25 Dec 2005
La damnation de Faust, Légende dramatique en quatre partiesMusic composed by Hector Berlioz. Libretto by Hector Berlioz, Almire Gandonanière and Gérard de Nerval after Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe »
16 Dec 2005
Mefistofele, Opera in un prologo, quattro atti e un epilogoMusic and libretto by Arrigo Boito (1842-1918), based on Faust: Eine Tragödie by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe »
11 Dec 2005
La Forza del Destino, a melodramma in quattro attiMusic composed by Giuseppe Verdi. Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave based on the drama Don Alvaro o La fuerza del sino by Angel Perez de Saavedra »
04 Dec 2005
Martha, an opera in four acts.Music composed by Friedrich von Flotow. Libretto by Wilhelm Friedrich.First performance: 25 November 1847 at Theater an der Wien, Vienna. »
01 Dec 2005
La serva padrona, intermezzo in two partsMusic composed by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. Libretto by Gennar'antonio Frederico.First performance: 28 August 1733, Teatro San Bartolomeo, Naples. »
27 Nov 2005
Fidelio, an opera in two acts »
20 Nov 2005
VERDI: Macbeth, melodramma in quattro parti.Music composed by Giuseppe Verdi. Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, based on the play by William Shakespeare. »
12 Nov 2005
Music composed by Johann Strauss II.Libretto by Richard Genée based on Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy/Karl Haffner.First performance: 5 April 1874 at the Theater an der Wien, Vienna. »
24 Oct 2005
Victorien Sardou (1831-1908) was a popular French dramatist during the later half of the 19th Century. He, along with Eugène Scribe, combined melodrama and realism to a produce a more serious form of drama that emphasized careful plot construction. »
10 Oct 2005
Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin (1799-1837) is generally considered Russia’s greatest poet. According to Andrew Kahn, his contemporaries held him “above all the master of the lyric poem, verse that is famous for its formal perfection and its reticent lyric persona, and infamous for its resistance to translation.” [Alexander Pushkin, The Queen of Spades and Other Stories, trans. Alan Myers, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997] »
05 Oct 2005
The Story of the Chevalier Des Grieux and Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost stands as one of the great works of French literature. It first appeared in 1731 as an appendix to the series, Memoirs and Adventures of a Man of Quality. It was later revised in 1753 for independent publication under the title Les Aventures du chevalier Des Grieux et Manon Lescaut with illustrations by Pasquier and Gravelot. »
18 Sep 2005
By early 1835 Giovanni Pacini had written almost fifty operas during the course of a career launched in 1813. He was tired and he was discouraged. Not only had his earlier works been overshadowed by the force of Rossini’s musical personality, but even after the departure of the Pesarese from Italy in 1823, Pacini’s star did not shine brighter. In his fascinating Memoirs, the composer examined these years and acknowledged his own limitations. Though the first performances of his Irene, o L’assedio di Messina (Naples, Teatro San Carlo, 30 November 1833) were largely rescued by the singers, Pacini knew the creative vein he had been mining was empty. Maturing under the spell of Rossini, he had not yet shown himself to be more than an able follower: “I began to realize that I should withdraw from the field.—Bellini, the divine Bellini, and Donizetti had surpassed me.” »
11 Sep 2005
Das Rheingold is the first of the four works that constitute Der Ring des Nibelungen. On the title page of Der Ring des Nibelungen, Wagner refers to Das Rheingold as a Vorabend (a preliminary evening). Nevertheless, Das Rheingold sets the foundation on which the remainder of the Ring is built. »
