Recently in Reviews
17 Mar 2010
Les Troyens is the noblest grand opera ever composed by a Frenchman, one of those desert-island works of which it is impossible to tire because its depths can never be completely sounded. »
17 Mar 2010
Advertised as ‘ A night of powerful music with today’s superstars,’ Arizona Opera’s concert of opera arias definitely lived up to those words. »
17 Mar 2010
Anguished, lacerating, irredeemably tragic, David Alden’s new production of Katya Kabanova presents a drama of unalleviated suffering and unremitting bleakness. »
17 Mar 2010
Five years after the première of Pelléas et Mélisande, Wilhelm
Worringer published the twentieth century’s first great treatise on
abstraction in art: »
17 Mar 2010
For many, the fine recordings of Richard Strauss’s tone poem Don Juan by the late Karl Böhm seem to have emerged full-spring from the baton of Karl Böhm and the playing of the various orchestras he led. »
17 Mar 2010
Philip Glass's Satyagraha at the English National Opera, at the Coliseum, London, proves that modern minimalism can be extraordinarily moving. The secret is to open your soul, as Gandhi did, when he searched the Baghavad-Gita for inspiration.
»
15 Mar 2010
A silvery tree stretched its gnarled branches across the moonlit stage, and from the briar and bush spiky, feathered fairies wriggled and crept, intent on mischief and malevolence. »
12 Mar 2010
When the orchestra re-tuned itself between the intermissionless acts of the Met premiere of The Nose last week, many in the audience were uncertain whether they were hearing practice or prelude. »
11 Mar 2010
The curtain rises on an enormous pile of crumbling reinforced concrete,
broken wires sticking out every which way – an image that has replaced
(at least in the minds of set designers) the romantic columned or castellated
ruins that thrilled our ancestors, especially around the time, 1846, that Verdi
composed Attila. »
09 Mar 2010
As a medic with a keen knowledge of psychology, Jonathan Miller probably knows a thing or two about elixirs and placebos. »
09 Mar 2010
The global credit crunch, with its painful exposure of the moral and literal
bankruptcy of our own age, provides the perfect backdrop for this new
production of Prokofiev’s The Gambler, the first ever staging of
this opera at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. »
08 Mar 2010
In its current revival of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore Lyric Opera of Chicago’s production showcases the strengths and foibles of humanity, while assuring the ultimate triumph of love. »
08 Mar 2010
Throughout his relatively long and decidedly successful career, Giacomo Puccini returned to those operas of his that had not, immediately or eventually, secured an important place in the standard repertory. »
08 Mar 2010
This second of two recitals of Schubert songs by Matthias Goerne and Helmut Deutsch at the Wigmore Hall, London was superb, the programme created with exceptional intelligence and insight into the inner dynamics of Schubert’s music. »
08 Mar 2010
Handel’s Tamerlano, in the production by Graham Vick, is well
known, but its run at the Royal Opera House is unusual because many of the cast
are creating the roles for the first time. It isn't a live reprise of the DVD,
but more challenging. »
05 Mar 2010
The Baden State Theatre's new mounting of I Masnadieri may not completely be the production of one’s dreams. »
05 Mar 2010
In this, the first of two recitals with pianist Helmut Deutsch, baritone Matthias Goerne continued his very personal journey through the landscape of Schubert’s lieder, a passage which is currently being preserved on an outstanding series of discs by Harmonia Mundi. »
05 Mar 2010
As the first familiar themes of Ariadne came from the pit, I felt
myself sinking — sinking from a tense, dreary, daily world into a sort of
ecstatic fantasy — a place where all was happy, funny, romantic, inane,
fateful and surprising all at once — Sarah Connolly superb, Kathleen Kim
charming, Nina Stemme full-throated, »
04 Mar 2010
Zürich Opera’s poster for their new production of Idomeneo is a knockout. »
13 Feb 2010
Concert opera has a long and glorious tradition in Montpellier. Each year the Orchestra National de Montpellier regales us with one or two during the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier (July). »
11 Feb 2010
Gluck’s Armide, as semi-staged (costumed dancers but no
scenery) at the Rose Theater by the Washington-based Opera Lafayette, was
exactly what Gluck designed the piece to be: a supremely elegant entertainment. »
10 Feb 2010
Michael Hampe seems to have been the director of choice in the 1980s for tastefully traditional Rossini productions. »
07 Feb 2010
Donizetti’s original concept of Lucia di Lammermoor is revealed in its true glory in this ground breaking production by the English National Opera, first heard in 2008. The opera is loved in its familiar form, but the new critical edition reveals the depth of Donizetti’s musical creation. »
07 Feb 2010
If you want Italian opera go to Italy and hope for the best — like conductor Daniel Oren’s Manon Lescaut two years ago in Genoa. »
04 Feb 2010
For those who might be seeking a representational tale of the legendary Roman slave Spartacus, well, Gladiator this ain’t. »
02 Feb 2010
First seen in 1995, and here receiving its seventh revival, Jonathan Miller’s Così fan tutte has lost none of its power to unsettle and discomfort. »
02 Feb 2010
Parsifal had its first performances in Bayreuth in 1882 where it was soon seen by Wagner’s soul mate Friedrich Nietzsche. And there the friendship ended. »
02 Feb 2010
Gil Shohat, now 35 and Israeli’s top classical composer, was 15 when
in the ‘80s he saw Hanoch Levin’s The Child Dream on stage in his native Tel Aviv. Shohat, of course, knew Levin’s work well, for throughout early decades in the history of Israel he — its outstanding dramatist — had served somewhat as the conscience of a nation tormented defining itself within its pain-wrought beginnings. »
01 Feb 2010
The Wigmore Hall was bursting its seams in excited anticipation of this recital by the American mezzo-soprano, Joyce DiDonato. »
29 Jan 2010
Melodic and scenic gaiety predominates in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s new
production of Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow. »
28 Jan 2010
The Times used to have a music critic who seemed to feel that singing,
especially in costume, didn’t count as serious music, though he reviewed
opera anyway. »
25 Jan 2010
Covent Garden has revived director Robert Lepage’s popular and well-traveled version of The Rake’s Progress with often thrilling results. »
25 Jan 2010
We all wish Henry Purcell had written a few more operas like Dido and
Aeneas — simple to cast, simple to stage, offering endless
possibilities for either reserved or outrageous treatment, attractive to every
sort of audience. »
22 Jan 2010
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, around 1777, the Empress Maria
Theresa used to visit Prince Esterhazy’s summer palace at Esterhàza,
where there was an opera house fully equipped with stage machinery, leading
singers, an orchestra, and a guy named Joseph Haydn to compose on cue. »
22 Jan 2010
While Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) is best known to modern audiences for his colorful programmatic works associated with Italian locations, his vocal music is also engaging. »
19 Jan 2010
Robert Stuart Thomson’s Italian language learning text, Operatic Italian, promises to become an invaluable textbook for aspiring operatic singers, voice teachers, coaches and conductors. »
18 Jan 2010
Stiffelio was composed just after Luisa Miller — an opera that has had little trouble holding its own in the repertory — and just before the magic trio of Rigoletto, Trovatore and Traviata, the first Verdi operas to take their immediate place on the stages of the world and hold them without a break from that day to this. »
18 Jan 2010
Most musical of mourners, weep anew!
Not all to that bright station dared to climb
And happier they their happiness who knew
Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time »
18 Jan 2010
Concert performances of operas are often problematic in that the work tends to be cut or otherwise played around with, or the venue is inappropriate - after all, these were meant to be staged pieces. »
17 Jan 2010
Elina Garanča conceals her gleaming gold tresses beneath a curly black wig to sing Carmen. »
17 Jan 2010
The Opéra National de Montpellier sometimes rises to artistic heights, and even when it fails its attempts are often interesting. »
14 Jan 2010
Are you sitting comfortably? »
08 Jan 2010
Well into the 1960s, ‘provincial theaters’ were the backbone of Italy’s operatic culture. »
07 Jan 2010
Rare repertory but not truly rare, Massenet’s Cendrillon makes an appearance from time to time. »
29 Dec 2009
David Agler must be feeling a trifle unlucky. Having in 2005 taken over the reins of a flourishing, internationally renowned opera festival, with a stylish new opera house in the planning and the Irish economy booming, his hopes must been high; but in the event the Canadian’s first few years as Artistic Director of the Wexford Festival Opera have been far from plain-sailing. »
18 Dec 2009
The roles Richard Strauss composed for his “chorus” of Five Serving Maids in Elektra — all that remains in the opera of the commentator chorus in Sophocles’ tragedy — are short but arduous. »
18 Dec 2009
Productions of Giuseppe Verdi’s early opera Ernani have become relatively infrequent primarily because of the difficulties of casting the work requiring four demanding roles. »
18 Dec 2009
Exchanging the stage of The Royal Opera House — where he is currently
performing the role of His Highness in Tchaikovsky’s fairy-tale opera,
The Tsarina's Slippers — »
18 Dec 2009
Encountering Frankfurt Opera’s staging of Leoni’s L’Oracolo and Puccini’s Le Villi, I was reminded of that old saw about the German weather. »
18 Dec 2009
It is hard to know where to start to adequately laud Netherlands Opera’s witty new La Fanciulla del West. »
