Recently in Reviews
02 Jul 2014
Belgian soprano Sophie Karthäuser has a rich range of vocal resources upon
which to draw: she has power and also precision; her top is bright and glinting
and it is complemented by a surprisingly full and rich lower register; she can
charm with a flowing lyrical line, but is also willing to take musical risks to
convey emotion and embody character. »
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. »
27 Jun 2014
Janáček started The Cunning Little Vixen on the cusp of old age in 1922 and there is something deeply elegiac about it. »
26 Jun 2014
It took only a couple of years for Il trovatore and Rigoletto to make it from Italy to the Opéra de Marseille, but it took La traviata (Venice, 1853) sixteen years (Marseille, 1869). »
23 Jun 2014
Gesamtkunstwerk, synthesis of fable, sound, shape and color in art, may have been made famous by Richard Wagner, and perhaps never more perfectly realized than just now by San Francisco Opera. »
23 Jun 2014
Luca Francesconi is well-respected in the avant garde. His music has been championed by the Arditti Quartett and features regularly in new music festivals. His opera Quartett has at last reached London after well-received performances in Milan and Amsterdam. »
19 Jun 2014
Manon Lescaut at the Royal Opera House, London, brings out the humanity which lies beneath Puccini's music. The composer was drawn to what we'd now called "outsiders. In Manon Lescaut, Puccini describes his anti-heroine with unsentimental honesty. His lush harmonies describe the way she abandons herself to luxury, but he doesn't lose sight of the moral toughness at the heart of Abbé Prévost's story, Manon is sensual but, like her brother, fatally obssessed with material things. Only when she has lost everything else does she find true values through love..
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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’. »
16 Jun 2014
An ideal choice for this year's Aldeburgh Music Festival, Britten's Owen Wingrave. From a very early age, Britten was incensed by bullying and repression. »
13 Jun 2014
To be uncomplimentary about the current production of Show Boat at San Francisco Opera will surely provoke a summons to appear before the House Un-American Activities Commission. »
12 Jun 2014
La Traviata has hit the stage at San Francisco Opera every three to five years (even annually in some periods) since 1924. Surprises have been rare. »
11 Jun 2014
On June 6, 2014, Opera Las Vegas presented Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville with a cast drawn from the Metropolitan Opera and other major companies. »
11 Jun 2014
The geographical and chronological transportation of Rossini’s famous
factotum from 18th-century Seville to 19th-century London
is director Oliver Platt’s most radical notion in this satisfying, if
somewhat straightforward, new production of Il barbiere di Siviglia
for Opera Holland Park. »
11 Jun 2014
In its annual concert devoted to performances by current members of the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center, Lyric Opera of Chicago showcased a roster of talented singers who will doubtless add greatly to operatic and concert stages of the immediate future. »
10 Jun 2014
Having become so jaded with indifferent — or, sadly, far worse than merely indifferent — stagings of an opera I love more than words can tell, it proved a relief and indeed a joy for me to attend this first revival of Jonathan Kent’s 2010 Glyndebourne production, especially its first act. »
10 Jun 2014
Is Garsington the new Glyndebourne, a Glyndebourne for the 21st Century? »
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. »
06 Jun 2014
First, a sigh of relief: in almost every respect, this new ENO staging of
Benvenuto Cellini marks a significant improvement »
06 Jun 2014
‘I like the atmosphere of the West’, Puccini wrote after seeing three of David Belasco’s plays performed on Broadway in 1907, ‘but in all the “pièces” I have seen, I have found only a few scenes here and there. »
03 Jun 2014
On May 23rd the Los Angeles Philharmonic premiered its production of
Così fan tutte, the third and last of the Mozart/Daponte opera series
it inaugurated in 2012. »
02 Jun 2014
A month in which London, or indeed anywhere else, saw one performances of a Birtwistle drama would be something. »
02 Jun 2014
For the final recital in his three-concert residency at the Wigmore Hall, Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley offered the familiar and the new in striking juxtaposition, Franz Schubert’s posthumously published Schwanengesang enclosing Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Rubáiyát, which was written specially for Finley. »
02 Jun 2014
A black bare stage heaving with a rebellious revolutionary throng; they stare with still hostility directly at the audience, stark light streaming from above. »
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. »
27 May 2014
In this Schubert Liederabende — the second in Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake’s planned series of four recitals at the Wigmore Hall — dark, sombre worlds evoking the romantic turbulence of Death and the Maiden were only briefly alleviated by radiance and light. »
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. »
22 May 2014
As Blanche, Renée Fleming sang her role with a sultry air. Her smooth, creamy tones revealed her character’s ultra-refined dream world as she told of having once been married to a gay man. The moment when Blanche met Stanley was electric. From that first second, the audience knew he hated everything she valued. »
22 May 2014
With the FIFA World Cup just three weeks away perhaps it is permissible to use a sporting metaphor, for this performance by The English Concert at the Wigmore Hall — part of the ensemble’s 40th anniversary celebrations — really was a game of two halves. »
19 May 2014
The company bids a smiling farewell to its 2013-14 HD simulcast season with Rossini’s comic masterpiece »
19 May 2014
It must be the sea air. In Thomas Hardy’s vignette ‘The History of the Hardcomes’, two young women — quiet, gentle Emily Darth, and the more lively, rumbustious Olive Pawle — are betrothed to two cousins, James and Stephen Hardcome; but the quartet decide that they are paired up wrongly, and so ‘swap’ suitors, submitting to a moment of irrational infatuation. »
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. »
19 May 2014
This was a truly outstanding performance, thoroughly worthy of its standing ovation. The only problem now will be of upholding such standards throughout the Barbican’s Birtwistle at 80 series. »
18 May 2014
Der Rosenkavalier opened Glyndebourne’s 80th anniversary season, dedicated to the memory of George Christie, who created country house opera as we know it today. »
13 May 2014
For its final production of the 2013-14 season Lyric Opera of Chicago featured Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito in a staging originating at the
Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, in co-production with the Théatre du Capitole de Toulouse and l’Opéra de Marseille. »
08 May 2014
Baden’s Easter Festival centerpiece was a solid production of Manon Lescaut that was well-intended, well-designed, and well-performed. »
08 May 2014
What a difference a venue and a cast can make!
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07 May 2014
“Oh! Woman! Woman! Woman!” So, cries Beaumarchais’s Figaro, in his
angry, self-chastising, at times self-pitying diatribe against the injustices
of ‘life’. “Oh, servants, servants, servants!” might be the Count’s
complaint in David McVicar’s production of Le Nozze di Figaro,
revived here for the sixth time. »
06 May 2014
Excellent Wigmore Hall recital with Stéphane Degout and Simon Lepper. Degout is one of the great names in French repertoire and in French baroque in particular. »
05 May 2014
Julian Anderson’s Thebans at the Coliseum, London, absolutely justifies the ENO's mission: opera, in English, and of national significance. Anderson is one of the most influential figures in modern British music. »
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. »
25 Apr 2014
The latest recital in the Songlives series at the Wigmore Hall turned the spotlight on a figure whose short compositional career and small oeuvre might have been expected to confine him to the margins of musical history, but whose name has in fact become almost synonymous with a whole genre of song: mélodie. »
23 Apr 2014
Manitoba Opera’s first production in nine years of Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème still stirs the heart and inspires tears with its tragic tale of bohemian artists living — and loving — in 1840s Paris. »
23 Apr 2014
On April 12, 2014, Arizona Opera opened its series of performances of Donizetti's Don Pasquale in Tucson. Chuck Hudson’s production of this opera combined Commedia dell’arte with Hollywood movie history. »
