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11 May 2013
Productions of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto can serve as a vehicle for individual singers to make a strong impression and become afterward associated with specific roles in the opera. »
11 May 2013
Just in case we were not aware that the evening’s programme was ‘themed’, the Britten Sinfonia designed a visual accompaniment to their musical exploration of night, sleep and dreams. »
10 May 2013
Poor Aida! She never seems to have anything go her way. »
05 May 2013
Is it possible to upstage Jonas Kaufmann? Kaufmann was brilliant in this Verdi Don Carlo at the Royal Opera House, London, but the rest of the cast was so good that he was but first among equals. Don Carlo is a vehicle for stars, but this time the stars were everyone on stage and in the pit. Even the solo arias, glorious as they are, grow organically out of perfect ensemble. This was a performance that brought out the true beauty of Verdi's music. »
04 May 2013
The big names were absent: Duparc, D’Indy, Debussy, Ravel … and while Fauré, Chausson, Roussel and several members of Les Six put in an appearance, in less than familiar guises, this survey of French song of the early 20th century and interwar years deliberately took us on a journey through infrequently travelled terrain. »
03 May 2013
Composed between 1718 and 1720, Handel’s Esther is sometimes described as the ‘first English Oratorio’, but is in fact a hybrid form, mixing elements of oratorio, masque, pastoral and opera.
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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. »
28 Apr 2013
St. John’s Smith Square was the site of Elizabeth Connell’s final London concert, intended as a farewell to London on her moving to Australia. It was rendered ultimately final by her unexpected death.
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25 Apr 2013
With the building of the Suez Canal, Egypt became more interesting to Western Europeans. Khedive Ismail Pasha wanted a hymn by Verdi for the opening of a new opera house in Cairo, but the composer said he did not write occasional pieces. »
23 Apr 2013
Back for its fourth revival, David McVicar’s 2003 production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte has much charm, beauty and artistry. »
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. »
12 Apr 2013
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro has a libretto by Lorenzo daPonte based on the French play La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro (The Crazy Day or the Marriage of Figaro) by Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799). »
11 Apr 2013
For its world class Easter Festival, Baden-Baden mounted a Die Zauberflöte that owed more to the grey penitential doldrums of Lent than to the unbridled jubilance of re-birth. »
11 Apr 2013
Once Berkeley Opera, renamed West Edge Opera, this enterprising company offers the Bay Area’s only serious alternative to corporate opera, to wit Bonjour M. Gauguin. »
11 Apr 2013
In the first of pianist Julius Drake’s three-part series,
‘Perspectives’, our gaze was directed at Gustav Mahler’s eclectic musical
responses to human experiences: from the trauma and distress of anguished love
to the sweet contentment of true friendship, from the agonised introspection of
the artist to the diverse dramas of human interaction. »
10 Apr 2013
The Los Angeles opera company marketed its spring production of Rossini's La Cenerentola as Cinderella though there is no opera by that name. The libretto of La Cenerentola is not the Cinderella story we know. »
05 Apr 2013
The Paris Opéra has not staged a full Ring Cycle since 1957, but its current season will conclude with a correction of this grand operatic gap. »
05 Apr 2013
Washington National’s 2012-2013 season continues this spring with a production of Giacomo Puccini’s first successful opera. »
05 Apr 2013
Italian composer Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968) wrote more than fifteen operas, of which almost none are staged today. »
04 Apr 2013
The Opera Group’s latest event, The Firework-maker’s Daughter by David Bruce and Glyn Maxwell is currently on tour and arrived at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre last night (3 April 2013). »
03 Apr 2013
Composer John Adams’ smashing, crashing and poignant The Gospel
According to the Other Mary, created in collaboration with Peter Sellars,
made its second appearance at Disney Hall with the Los Angeles Philharmonic
Orchestra. »
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. »
26 Mar 2013
The Los Angeles Opera company opened its spring season in celebration of
Richard Wagner's bicentennial with the composer's The Flying Dutchman,
written in 1843. »
26 Mar 2013
Cruzar la Cara de la Luna (To Cross the Face of the Moon) has been performed in Houston and Paris. »
20 Mar 2013
Don’t miss UC Opera’s I Lombardi at the Bloomsbury Theatre. »
19 Mar 2013
Sets and costumes are gorgeous and the singing is good, but the libretto’s slow and continuously interrupted dramatic action grows tiresome »
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. »
15 Mar 2013
With Robert Carsen’s production of Falstaff almost inescapably
making the rounds of the world's operatic stages, it is well worth it to take
in another production altogether. »
15 Mar 2013
Rossini's “other” comic masterpiece of 1817 came into the world only a few weeks after the much better known The Barber of Seville. But it has had a place in the repertoire since its premiere. »
12 Mar 2013
Productions of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg are ambitious undertakings, if only for the number of performers involved and the duration of orchestral and vocal commitment. »
11 Mar 2013
San Francisco and Naples have much in common these days — streets with potholes, ever more gourmet pizzerias, homeless, etc., and, yes, Nicola Luisotti. »
11 Mar 2013
Giuseppe Verdi and his librettist, Salvatore Cammarano, based the opera on Antonio García Gutiérrez’s Spanish play El Trovador. »
10 Mar 2013
George Benjamin's Written on Skin sinks deeply into the psyche. A Protector wants brightly coloured images to display his power and wealth. »
09 Mar 2013
Jean-Baptiste Lully's Phaeton is rarely heard live in Britain, so this performance with a superlative cast was a special occasion. It was part of the Barbican Hall's continuing series of baroque, and particularly French baroque operas. »
06 Mar 2013
ENO’s advertising emphasises the ‘25th anniversary year’ of Jonathan Miller’s staging of The Barber of Seville. It holds the stage well enough without offering any especial insight — at least by now. »
05 Mar 2013
This prioduction of Wagner's Parsifal, directed by François Girard, premiered in Lyons last year. The Met, being a far wealthier house, was able to assemble a truly spectacular cast: Jonas Kaufmann, René Pape, Katarina Dalayman, Peter Mattei and Evgeny Nikitin. Success guaranteed, even if the production is European and modern. These performances set new benchmarks. This Parsifal will be the stuff of legend for decades to come. »
05 Mar 2013
Palm Beach audiences are famous for their glamour, but in recent years a special star has sparkled amid the jewels, sequins, feathers and furs (whatever the weather). »
05 Mar 2013
Puccini’s “shabby little shocker”, to quote Kerman, does not invite subtlety. For those who feel that opera — a hybrid art form encompassing all the arts and embracing all of life and love, transfiguration and tragedy — is ideally suited to depicting the excesses of human ecstasy and suffering, Tosca epitomises the immoderations of the genre. »
05 Mar 2013
Argentinean mezzo-soprano Bernarda Fink continued her series residency at the Wigmore Hall with an unusual programme of Italian baroque works, partnered by the Academy of Ancient Music, led by violinist Rodolfo Richter. »
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. »
02 Mar 2013
When opera companies arrange their seasonal schedules, one wonders how much
thought they give to Valentine’s Day. If it falls in the midweek, it is potentially a very propitious day for getting people out: that is, if the opera is right. »
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 »
26 Feb 2013
Bavarian State Opera’s recent staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen was often a restless, even reckless affair, but there is no denying its substantial musical assets.
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21 Feb 2013
Fun and Hugo Wolf ? Wolf's songs are the epitome of art song, due great reverence. But they're also vibrant with good-hearted wit. This latest concert in Julius Drake's ongoing "Perspectives" series at the Wigmore Hall brought together Sophie Daneman, Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake, all of whom have been working together for many years. The chemistry was almost palpable. »
17 Feb 2013
In 1704, 11 years after its first performance in 1693 before the royal court
of Louis XIV, and 17 years after the death of Lully — and at a time when
the relative merits of respective French and Italian aesthetics were constantly
and fiercely being debated — Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Médée was
condemned by the ‘Lullist’ faction, who were determined to defend
their leader’s guardianship of the tragédie en musique, as an
‘abomination’: hard, dry and characterised by excess. »
