Recently in Reviews
23 Jan 2014
The dimly lit stage becomes gradually suffused with spare light during the prelude to Richard Wagner’s Parsifal in its new production at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. »
22 Jan 2014
In a staging shared with Houston Grand Opera and the Canadian Opera Company, Lyric Opera of Chicago presented recently a new production of Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata. »
22 Jan 2014
If you’re the sort of audience member who, when watching a performance of a play or opera, often experiences the urge to abandon your seat and join in with action, then the English Pocket Opera Company’s 2014 collaborative project will be just the thing for you. »
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?). »
22 Jan 2014
Tart with a heart, pleasure-loving ingénue, exploited naïf, or femme fatale? »
22 Jan 2014
This recital, part of an inventive series overseen by pianist Malcolm
Martineau, did exactly what it said on the tin: it journeyed the length of
Brahms’ creative life as a composer of songs, from his earliest adolescent
essays, through the early years of expansion and experiment, to the period of
maturity and confidence as the composer established himself in Vienna,
concluding with the moving, nuanced testaments of Brahms’ final years. »
21 Jan 2014
Entering the hall there arose the Dantesque “abandon all hope ye who enter” feeling — a cluttered a vista socialist setting, a poster of Lenin and large letters proclaiming Moscow, December 1999. »
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. »
13 Jan 2014
This Cosi fan tutte completes the Montpellier Mozart/da Ponte trilogy staged by French metteur en scène and esthète Jean-Paul Scarpitta. Primarily studies in elegance and refinement these mises en scènes have provoked all that that is most precious and perfect in Mozart’s scores. »
08 Jan 2014
At the Wigmore Hall, London, Matthias Goerne and Lief Ove Andsnes performed Mahler in a unique programme built around Shostakovich's Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti, op 145 (1974). »
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. »
30 Dec 2013
Manitoba Opera opened its 41st season with a rootin’ tootin’ new production of Don Pasquale from November 23 through 29, last staged by the Prairie company in 1997. »
24 Dec 2013
In this unusual programme of late-seventeenth-century airs de cour,
Les Arts Florissants presented a flowing sequence of songs for solo and
ensemble voices with chamber accompaniment, the intimacy of the Wigmore Hall
neatly mimicking the privacy of the royal chambers of Louis XIV in which the
courtly compositions were originally performed. »
19 Dec 2013
Francesco Zambello’s 2006 Carmen, here revived for the sixth time, seems to have something of an identity crisis: sumptuous spectacle or gritty drama? »
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. »
16 Dec 2013
With the gaudy excesses of secular seasonal indulgence just a few streets away and the tills of Oxford Street traders rattling out melodies of materialism, this advent programme of elegance and refinement offered by lutenist Elizabeth Kenny and the early music ensemble which she founded, Theatre of the Ayre, provided a welcome opportunity for repose and reflection. »
16 Dec 2013
Jihoon Kim is shining proof that the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme at the Royal Opera House, London, develops singers into complete artists.
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11 Dec 2013
Los Angeles Opera's new production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's The Magic Flute opened on November 23, 2013. Brought here from the Komische Oper in Berlin where it premiered last year, the production is a multimedia rendition in the style of the British theater group 1927. »
11 Dec 2013
As part of this year’s tribute to Benjamin Britten the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Chorus, and soloists recently gave several performances of the composer’s War Requiem. »
04 Dec 2013
Heldentenor Jay Hunter Morris tells us about the lean times when the phone did not ring, as well as those thrilling moments when companies entrusted him with the most important roles in opera. »
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. »
02 Dec 2013
Poor Weber: opera companies, especially in England, do him anything but proud. »
29 Nov 2013
Acis and Galatea was one of Handel’s most popular works, frequently revived in his life time and beyond. »
27 Nov 2013
German tenor Werner Güra, who has made a speciality of the German lieder repertoire, opened this recital at the Wigmore Hall with Beethoven’s An Die Ferne Geliebte, the composer’s only song cycle and the first significant example of the form. »
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.”
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19 Nov 2013
Richard Wagner wrote: "The voyage through the Norwegian reefs made a wonderful impression on my imagination; the legend of the Flying Dutchman, which the sailors verified, took on a distinctive, strange coloring that only my sea adventures could have given it.” »
18 Nov 2013
‘If she is adulterous, why is she praised? If chaste, why was she put to death?’ »
17 Nov 2013
San Francisco Opera wraps up its fall season of five operas with what it insists is a new production of Rossini’s comic masterpiece. »
11 Nov 2013
On Remembrance Sunday, Semyon Bychkov conducted Benjamin Britten's War Requiem at the Royal Albert Hall with Roderick Williams, Allan Clayton, Sabrina Cvilak, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Chorus, Crouch End Festival Chorus and choristers of Westminster Abbey. »
09 Nov 2013
The mantle of tenor Peter Pears’ legacy hung heavily over his immediate ‘successors’, as they performed music that had been composed by Benjamin Britten for the man to whom he avowed, ‘I write every note with your heavenly voice in my head’. »
08 Nov 2013
One year since the launch of their project to create a contemporary book of Italians madrigals, vocal ensemble Exaudi returned to the Wigmore Hall to present an intermingling of old and new madrigals which was typically inventive, virtuosic and compelling. »
08 Nov 2013
Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Coliseum could give the ENO a welcome boost. »
07 Nov 2013
Lyric Opera of Chicago’s current new production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, an effort shared with Houston Grand Opera and the Grand Théâtre de Genève, tends to emphasize emotional involvements against a backdrop of spare sets. »
07 Nov 2013
Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera, The Nose, based on Gogol’s short story of the same name, was a smash hit for the Metropolitan Opera company in 2010 and once again, this season. »
05 Nov 2013
There might not be much ‘Serenissima’ about Yoshi Oida’s 2007 production of Death in Venice — it’s more Japanese minimalism than Venetian splendour — but there is still plenty to admire, as this excellent revival by Opera North as part of its centennial celebration, Festival of Britten, underlines. »
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. »
02 Nov 2013
Whatever you think of some of the Metropolitan Opera’s recent productions, you cannot fault the Gelb administration for fearing to take risks. »
01 Nov 2013
The lustreless white tiles of the laboratory which forms the set of Keith Warner’s pitiless staging of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck offer little respite — cold, hard, rigid and severe, they are a material embodiment of the bleakness and barrenness of the tragic events which will be played out within the workshop walls (sets by Stefanos Lazaridis). »
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. »
29 Oct 2013
At the heart of this Wigmore Hall recital were two sacred vocal works for solo countertenor and small instrumental forces, recently recorded by Florilegium and Robin Blaze to considerable critical acclaim: J.S. Bach’s cantata ‘Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust’ and Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s ‘Salve Regina’. »
24 Oct 2013
Train wrecks are fascinating events, huge forces collide, brutal destruction results. Investigators rush to the scene to explain how and why it happened. »
23 Oct 2013
After the bitter disappointment of »
23 Oct 2013
There is a cornucopia of ideas on display in Gluck’s Armide at Amsterdam’s Het Muziektheater, but sadly only a few of them seemed to serve the piece.
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23 Oct 2013
Even before it opened, Royal Opera’s Les vêpres siciliennes was the must-see production of the season. »
23 Oct 2013
Lyric Opera of Chicago has opened the season with a revival of its 2001 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello. »
23 Oct 2013
Having impressed UK audiences in La Boheme (for ENO) and American Lulu (for the Opera Group/Scottish Opera), »
22 Oct 2013
First seen in 2005, and since feted in London (several times), New York and Lithuania, Anthony Minghella’s cinematic production of Madame Butterfly remains a breath-taking visual banquet. »
15 Oct 2013
The star of the show was the agile Robert Orth as Sir Joseph Porter, the First Lord of the Admiralty. A fine operatic baritone, Orth’s patter was machine gun fast, crisp, and completely understandable. »
