Recently in Reviews
17 Feb 2012
Critics. Can you get along without us? It is possible to reflect on this when the production of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale is shown on television tonight. »
17 Feb 2012
Henri Sauguet is not entirely unknown in opera circles — divas Regine Crespin, Felicity Lott, Nathalie Dessay and Leontyne Price have included his arias in their solo albums. Plus there is a recording of his 1954 opera-comique Les Caprices de Marianne. »
17 Feb 2012
In its current revival of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida Lyric Opera of Chicago approaches the challenges of the ambitious score with a cast well suited to the music and to the drama. »
16 Feb 2012
It was a performance of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville in the late 90’s that marked my first visit to the Met. »
16 Feb 2012
One of the guiding principles of the revisionist (if not intervisionist) school of opera directing commonly called “regie-theater” is that certain outdated dramatic conventions in the librettos of many great operas can actually interfere with a contemporary audience’s ability to perceive the true artistic worth of the work of art. »
15 Feb 2012
David McVicar’s production of The Marriage of Figaro, previously staged in 2006 (twice), »
13 Feb 2012
Ernani accosts us with the charm and the gaucherie of a provincial youth
without much experience as the host of a classy party. »
11 Feb 2012
In many respects, The Tales of Hoffmann and Richard Jones would seem a good fit. »
10 Feb 2012
Winnipeg music lovers were willingly transported back several centuries as
Daniel Taylor and Montreal-based Theatre of Early Music graced Westminster
United Church with a program of infrequently heard music. »
08 Feb 2012
Recorded on 14 June 1964 at the Großer Saal of the Musikverein, Vienna, as part of the Wiener Festwochen, this legendary performance of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde was released in 2011 on Deutsche Grammophon. »
08 Feb 2012
All the important directors pass through Lyon, so it was just a matter of time before British director David Pountney would be invited to stage a production. It was Puccini’s triptych. »
08 Feb 2012
In advance of the new Rusalka at the Royal Opera House, the Barbican and the BBC Symphony Orchestra brought an electrifying performance of Dvořák's The Jacobin to London. »
08 Feb 2012
If Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is arguably one of his more familiar pieces, live performances of the work can vary depending on the abilities of the performers to meet the various challenges of the piece. »
08 Feb 2012
English National Opera’s revival of Richard Strauss’s fin de
siècle Figaro is a heart-warming treat for a cold winter’s
night. »
08 Feb 2012
I failed to discern any rationale behind programming the Brecht-Weill ballet chanté with various works by Debussy, one orchestrated by Robin Holloway. »
06 Feb 2012
The magic was in the pit, not that all Monaco was not magical — on January 25 a yellow Lamborghini, a red Ferrari, a vintage Jaguar among other magnificent machines stood before the entrance to Monte-Carlo’s resplendent Casino cum transplendent 500-seat opera house. »
03 Feb 2012
Each year, the Wigmore Hall commemorates Franz Schubert’s birthday with a high profile recital. This year, Werner Güra and Roger Vignoles presented a recital which was a timely reminder of what Lieder performance should be. »
02 Feb 2012
The San Diego Opera Company opened its 47th season on Saturday, January 26th
with Richard Strauss’ Salome, a work that has something in it for
everyone: lust, love, lasciviousness, homosexuality, heterosexuality, homicide,
suicide, a voluptuous dance and quickie nudity. »
02 Feb 2012
Released in 2011, this disc reproduces a performance of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde that was recorded on 10 November 1989 at the Grzegorz Fitelberg Concert Hall, Katowice [Poland]. »
02 Feb 2012
Lyric Opera of Chicago’s recent revival of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte offered a production with vocal pairs carefully matched and dramatic representation expressing the varying shades of Mozart’s score. »
02 Feb 2012
British composer Jonathan Harvey’s Wagner Dream came to London four years after its premieres at the Holland Festival and in Luxembourg.
»
31 Jan 2012
For the first hour or so of the latest Opera Orchestra of New York venture, a concert performance of Wagner’s Rienzi, I often said to myself, This…isn’t so terrible. »
31 Jan 2012
Repeatedly revived since its final appearance in 1995, Jonathan
Miller’s Così fan tutte returned yet again to the Covent Garden
stage as the second part of the ‘Olympic’ cycle of Mozart-Da Ponte
collaborations. »
31 Jan 2012
A year or two back, Opera Lafayette, the Washington-based company that
specializes in eighteenth-century obscurités françaises, presented
Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny’s Le Magnifique, an
opéra-comique about a race horse. »
27 Jan 2012
Introducing the winter-spring season, ROH Chief Executive Tony Hall explains the (perhaps a tad spurious) Olympic ‘concept’ which has inspired the season’s programming, the five interlocking rings of the Olympic insignia motivating the performance of a series of works staged in ‘cycle form’. »
27 Jan 2012
Founded in 1984, the Basel Chamber Orchestra has developed a penchant for
programmes which combine the modern and unfamiliar with the traditional and
renowned. »
27 Jan 2012
Three La Bohèmes in ten days, a critic’s nightmare that was more fun than a barrel of monkeys. »
25 Jan 2012
This year is a big year for the Met. Of the seven new productions on the roster, two are the last two installments of a much-anticipated Robert Lepage Ring. »
25 Jan 2012
This buoyant, refreshing performance of Haydn’s late oratorio, The Seasons, by Paul McCreesh’s superb Gabrieli Consort and Players conjured
a calendric kaleidoscope of seasonal climes, from the warm bucolic breezes of spring to summer’s fierce suns and flashing storms, from autumnal harvests and hunts to the frozen mists and fiery hearth-sides of winter. »
25 Jan 2012
Composed during the spring hunting season of 1684, for a patron and performance venue unknown, Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s brief six-scene Opera de Chasse (‘Hunting Opera’), Actéon, has remained seldom performed and something of a mystery. »
25 Jan 2012
War and destruction is everywhere these days, not least in Pesaro where Graham Vick staged a lethal Mosé in Egitto last August, nor less so in San Francisco where baritone Thomas Hampson perished as Rick Rescorla in Heart of a Soldier last September. »
25 Jan 2012
Hugo Wolf is a hard sell. Technical expertise isn't enough. The secret to singing Wolf is expressing the unique personality in each song. Wolf, perhaps more than any other composer, creates miniatures that open out into mini-operas when performed well. »
23 Jan 2012
Richard Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos presents challenges in casting not only because of the vocal line and identity associated with individual characters but also because of its nature as a self-comment on the musical stage and the requisite dramatic skills thus needed. »
23 Jan 2012
What does it say about New York that, in the songs of the city commissioned by the Five Boroughs Music Festival and given performances in Brooklyn, Queens and, now, Manhattan, the poets (often the composers themselves) rarely refer to life in that central part of the city, Rodgers and Hart’s “isle of joy”? »
05 Jan 2012
This performance of La Traviata was the 454th at the Royal Opera House, and the first performance in the 3rd revival this season of Richard Eyre’s production. »
28 Dec 2011
Ruggero Leoncavallo’s name is forever tied to that of Pietro Mascagni. »
28 Dec 2011
In contrast to much music-making on the continent, English composers born in the last quarter of the sixteenth century seem to have embraced a notable degree of stylistic continuity. »
28 Dec 2011
Homage could take diverse forms in Counter-Reformation Rome, and this excellent recording by ensemble officium, Messa di Santa Cecilia, focuses on a particular instance that was interestingly polyvalent. »
23 Dec 2011
Perhaps it’s no accident that Graham Vick’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg returns to the Royal Opera House for the Christmas season. Red, green, gold, sumptuous colours that warm a long, grey evening. »
23 Dec 2011
This latest instalment of Ian Bostridge’s ‘Ancient and Modern’ series juxtaposed the tender melancholy of the Elizabethan age with the modernist anxieties of the early twentieth century, revealing both a sensitivity to textual nuance and profound human sensibilities which transcend temporal epochs. »
22 Dec 2011
2011 has been a good year for baritone Jonathan McGovern: 2nd prize at the Kathleen Ferrier Awards, the Karaviotis Prise at the Les Azuriales Ozone Young Artists Competition, and the John Meikle Duo Prize at the Wigmore Hall/Kohn Foundation International Song Competition are just some of the awards he has garnered. »
22 Dec 2011
In Wilhelm Weitsch’s well-known painting of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, the eldest son of Johann Sebastian seems far distant from the cantorial world of his father. »
19 Dec 2011
Jean-Philippe Rameau, an organist and music theoretician, was active for much of his life in musical centers distant from the cultural juggernaut of Paris. »
19 Dec 2011
In the first part of the seventeenth century, the north German city of Hamburg spawned an unusually rich organ culture, with Jacob Praetorius, the younger, and Heinrich Scheidemann both pupils of the famous Dutch organist, Jan Pieterzoon Sweelinck, as leading figures. »
18 Dec 2011
This recent recording of the men and boys from King’s College, Cambridge, is an anthology organized around the texts and themes of the liturgical year, a scheme that offers ample opportunity for diverse works—in that sense the recording feels something like a “sampler”—but a scheme that also reflects the real experience of the daily life of the choir which sings demanding choral services six days of the week in term time. »
16 Dec 2011
The Wigmore Hall marks the 75th anniversary of the death of Maurice Ravel with a series of concerts that run through to June 2012. »
16 Dec 2011
A self-published recording, baritone Randal Turner’s traversal of contemporary songs in English, Living American Composers, makes for a fine vocal calling card. »
