Recently in Reviews
11 Jul 2017
Bathed in Mediterranean light, basking in enlightenment Aix found two famous classical works, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in its famous festival’s open air Théâtre de l’Archevêche. But were we enlightened? »
10 Jul 2017
Des Moines Metro Opera’s richly detailed production of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music left an appreciative audience to waltz home on air, and has prompted this viewer to search for adequate superlatives. »
10 Jul 2017
Of all the places, I did not expect a sublime Tristan und Isolde in a repurposed barn in the Cotswolds. Don’t be fooled by Longborough’s stage without lavish red curtains to open and close each act. Any opera house would envy the riveting chemistry between Peter Wedd and Lee Bisset in this intimate, 500 seat setting. Conductor Anthony Negus proved himself a master at Wagner’s emotional depth. Epic drama in minimalistic elegance: who needs a big budget when you have talent and drama this passionate? »
09 Jul 2017
For almost thirty years, summer at the Concertgebouw has been synonymous
with Robeco SummerNights. This popular series expands the classical concert
formula with pop, film music, jazz and more, served straight up or mixed
together. Composer Leonard Bernstein’s versatility makes his oeuvre,
ranging from Broadway to opera, prime SummerNight fare. »
09 Jul 2017
It was fascinating to see — and of course, to hear — Krzysztof
Warlikowsi’s productions of Die Gezeichneten and Die Frau
ohne Schatten on consecutive nights of this year’s Munich Opera
Festival. »
09 Jul 2017
There have to be special reasons to release a monophonic live recording of a
much-recorded opera. Often it can give us the opportunity to hear a singer in a
major role that he or she never recorded commercially—or did record on
some later occasion, when the voice was no longer fresh. Often a live recording
catches the dramatic flow better than certain studio recordings that may be
more perfect technically. »
08 Jul 2017
Critic and scholar John Barker has several times complained, in the pages of
American Record Guide, about Baroque vocal recitals that add
instrumental works or movements as supposed relief or (as he nicely calls them)
“spacers.” »
08 Jul 2017
Hans Knappertsbusch was one of the most renowned Wagner conductors who ever
lived. His recordings of Parsifal, especially, are near-legendary
among confirmed Wagnerians. »
08 Jul 2017
Dulwich Opera Company’s Carmen was a convincingly successful show. This was mainly due to succinct musical direction and rigorous dramatic direction. It also meant that the proximity of the action was a fascinating treat, and by the artists being young, and easy on the eye. »
08 Jul 2017
There is a host of fine operas out there languishing more or less
unperformed (in some cases, quite unperformed). A few of them might even
qualify as ‘great’. (Feel free to remove inverted commas, should
that be your thing.) Franz Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten, whatever
its proponents might claim, is certainly not one of those: not even close. »
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. »
07 Jul 2017
Andrei Serban’s 1984 production of Turandot has returned to the Royal Opera House, for its sixteenth revival, and it remains a visual feast. The principals’ raw silk costumes, intricately embroidered and patterned, splash vibrant primary hues against the shadowy tiers which house the red-masked Chorus to the rear. »
05 Jul 2017
Fidelio is a great opera, but not an easy one to
perform. Much of the music is stirring, including some among the most
profoundly moving passages in all opera. The revolutionary political idealism
that underlies the opera is inspiring, particularly to those in German-speaking
lands, where it inspires reverence. »
05 Jul 2017
There were four simultaneous Carmen — those of Prosper Merimee, Georges Bizet, Dimitri Tcherniakov and Pablo Heras-Casado. »
04 Jul 2017
Back to the operatic days when the book took top billing and the composer's name was in the fine print. Collodi’s tale is an epic journey wrapped in sophisticated innocence that leaves you probably more disgusted than anything else — Collodi’s Pinocchio is not a charming child. »
04 Jul 2017
Franz Schreker Die Gezeichneten from the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, conducted by Ingo Metzmacher, easily the most rewarding full performance ever. Metzmacher gets Schreker - revealing his modernity and originality. There are many kinds of "modern". The idea that 20th-century music can only be atonal/tonal, or dissonant /romantic, is nonsense in itself. Schreker was a highly original composer, very much a man attuned to the creative ferment of his time, fuelled as it was by new ideas and social change. »
03 Jul 2017
There can hardly be a dry eye in the house, at the ‘Theatre in the Woods’ at West Horsley Place - Grange Park Opera’s new home - when, in Act 3 of Janáček's first mature opera, Natalya Romaniw’s Jenůfa realises that the tiny child whose frozen body has been discovered under the ice is her own dead son. »
02 Jul 2017
WNO’s summer tour of Joachim Herz’s 1978 production of Madame Butterfly, revived by Sarah Crisp, arrived at the Birmingham Hippodrome this week. A ‘traditional’ assemblage of raised dwellings and sliding Shoji screens, Reinhart Zimmermann’s sepia set evokes the dulling of oriental grace by Western mundanity. For the dull taupe curtains which frame the sides and room of the set drape their traditional sprinkling of willow and bamboo like a bleached Hokusai wave. The effect is suffocating, blocking out any sense of a world outside Cio-Cio-San’s abode. »
02 Jul 2017
Time, sands, mists: all slip through one’s fingers - intangible and irretrievable. Olivia Fuchs’ production of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier for WNO communicates the opera’s message in a clear visual narrative of subtlety and dramatic eloquence. »
01 Jul 2017
One might expect a satire on sexual stereotypes penned in 1917 to feel a bit dated in 2017. But, in these days of gender fluidity, with science making biological choice a free-for-all, and with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale having just hit US and UK television screens, Poulenc’s gender-bending Les mamelles de Tirésias - based on Apollinaire’s surrealist play and first seen at the Opera Comique in 1947 - proved a timely choice for the first half of RCM’s summer double bill. »
27 Jun 2017
Kathleen Ferrier Remembered, from SOMM Recordings, makes available on CD archive broadcasts of British and German song. All come from BBC broadcasts made between 1947 and 1952. Of the 26 tracks in this collection, 19 are "new", not having been commercially released. The remaining seven have been remastered by sound restoration engineer Ted Kendall. Something here even for those who already own the complete recordings. »
27 Jun 2017
Opera Theatre of Saint Louis knew to trust the surefire potential of Madame Butterfly, and pretty much stayed out of its way. »
27 Jun 2017
If opera is to remain a viable, accessible 21st century art form, it will be largely owing to the commitment of visionary companies like Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. »
27 Jun 2017
Mozart’s opera seria, La Clemenza di Tito, performed in English at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis did something I did not think possible. »
27 Jun 2017
Martin Duncan's production of Rossini's Il turco in Italia debuted in 2011, only the second production to be performed in Garsington Opera's then new home at Wormsley. Revived for the first time on 25 June 2017, David Parry was again conducting with Quirijn de Lang as Selim, Geoffrey Dolton as Don Geronio and Mark Stone as Prosdocimo returning to their roles, plus Sarah Tynan as Fiorilla, Katie Bray as Zaide, Luciano Botelho as Narciso and Jack Swanson as Albazar. Designs were by Francis O'Connor, with lighting by Mark Jonathan and movement by Nick Winston. »
27 Jun 2017
It’s country-house opera season, and Glyndebourne have decided it’s time for a return of Katharina Thoma’s country-house-set Ariadne auf Naxos, first seen in 2013. Thoma locates Strauss’s opera-about-opera in a 1940s manor house which has been sequestered as a military hospital, neatly alluding to Glyndebourne’s own history when it transformed itself into a centre for evacuees from east London and the Christie children’s nursery became a sick bay. »
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. »
25 Jun 2017
On June 9, 2017, Opera Las Vegas presented a traditional production of Verdi’s Rigoletto conducted by Music Director Gregory Buchalter with a cast headed by veteran baritone Michael Chioldi. A most convincing Rigoletto, Chioldi was a man in psychological pain from the begining of the opera. His fear and his vulnerability to the whims of the nobility were evident in every meaty, well-colored phrase he sang. »
25 Jun 2017
Thumbprint is the story of the young, innocent and illiterate Mukhtar Mai who was assaulted by a group of powerful men. Following the attack, Mukhtar, having supposedly been disgraced, was expected to commit suicide. Instead, she amazed everyone who knew her by going to the police and calling for the arrest of her attackers. »
23 Jun 2017
Out of the blackness, Keith Warner’s new production of Verdi’s Otello explodes into being with a violent gesture of fury. Not the tempest raging in the pit - though Antonio Pappano conjures a terrifying maelstrom from the ROH Orchestra and the enlarged ROH Chorus hurls a blood-curdling battering-ram of sound into the auditorium. Rather, Warner offers a spot-lit emblem of frustrated malice and wrath, as a lone soldier fiercely hurls a Venetian mask to the ground. »
22 Jun 2017
First mounted in 2015 at the Opéra National de Bordeaux this splendid Don Carlo production took stage just now at the Opéra de Marseille with a completely different cast and conductor. This Marseille edition achieved an artistic stature rarely found hereabouts, or anywhere. »
21 Jun 2017
Unconventional to the last, Diamanda Galás tore through her Barbican concert on Monday evening with a torrential force that shattered the inertia and passivity of the modern song recital. This was operatic activism, pure and simple. Dressed in metallic, shimmering black she moved rather stately across the stage to her piano - but there was nothing stately about what unfolded during the next 90 minutes. »
