Reviews

05 Oct 2020

ETO Autumn 2020 Season Announcement: Lyric Solitude

English Touring Opera are delighted to announce a season of lyric monodramas to tour nationally from October to December. The season features music for solo singer and piano by Argento, Britten, Tippett and Shostakovich with a bold and inventive approach to making opera during social distancing. »

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16 Dec 2011

Anne Schwanewilms, Wigmore Hall

Combining innate musicianship and superb technique, Anne Schwanewilms showed once again that she can run the emotional gamut from light-hearted joy to deep anguish in this flawless performance with pianist, Charles Spencer. »

16 Dec 2011

Karita Mattila at Carnegie Hall

In 1983, Karita Mattila was the first singer to win the Cardiff Singer of the World competition.  »

13 Dec 2011

Kurt Weill’s Magical Night, Linbury Studio Theatre, London

Buzz Lightyear Meets Hansel and Gretel! Most children who have grown up in the Toy Story era know that toys come alive when left to their own devices.  »

13 Dec 2011

Belshazzar’s Feast, London

The English Oratorio season at the Barbican Hall, London continued with Gerald Finley and two very different approaches to Belshazzar’s Feast — William Walton and Jean Sibelius.  »

13 Dec 2011

Drapes ‘n’ Drops in Paris Forza

Paris Opera has lavished quite a monumental staging on Verdi’s musically rich (and Piave’s dramatically vapid) La Forza del Destino. »

13 Dec 2011

Call Her Flott — Felicity Lott sings in English

Soprano Felicity Lott has concentrated her career in her UK homeland and in Europe, although she certainly has had her share of US appearances.  »

13 Dec 2011

Colossal Hercules in Essen

Apparently the Aalto Theater didn’t get the memo that oratorios often make weak theatre pieces, since the company presented such a gripping dramatic case for Handel’s Hercules.  »

13 Dec 2011

Amsterdam’s Adventurous Idomeneo

Straight to the point: Netherlands Opera has mounted as luminous and emotionally engaging an Idomeneo as is imaginable. »

13 Dec 2011

Grand Don Giovanni, La Scala, Milan

More than a gala for Milan and for Italy, this wonderful Don Giovanni at Teatro alla Scala, Milan, was a gala for all the world, broadcast live internationally. »

09 Dec 2011

Berlioz: L’Enfance du Christ, London

I have somehow managed to miss Sir Colin Davis’s London performances of L’Enfance du Christ, making it one of the final major Berlioz works I have heard in the flesh.  »

06 Dec 2011

Silent Night, Minnesota Opera

At the November 12, 2011 world premiere of Silent Night at the Ordway Theatre in St. Paul, a buzz of energy filled the audience.  »

05 Dec 2011

Anne Sofie von Otter and Brad Mehldau: Love Songs

Brad Mehldau seems to be the “go to” jazz pianist for classically trained singers who want to venture into other musical territory than opera and lieder.  »

02 Dec 2011

Faust, Metropolitan Opera

At one point in The Met’s history, Faust was performed so frequently that one critic in mocking reference to Wagner’s opera house at Bayreuth coined the theater Faustophilhaus.  »

02 Dec 2011

Antwerp’s Puzzling Tchaikovsky Rarity

From the moment the curtain rose to reveal a loony bin instead of the 15th Century Inn of the libretto, it seemed likely the Flemish Opera was going to raise more questions than it answered about Tchaikovsky’s rarely performed The Enchantress.  »

02 Dec 2011

Perceptive La Traviata, Royal Opera House

Richard Eyre’s 1994 staging of Verdi’s La Traviata may have been revived many times, but this production reveals striking new depths of interpretation.  »

01 Dec 2011

Salome, Manitoba Opera

Opera has never been an art form to hold anything back. But even within the genre itself, Salome is — literally — one tough, depraved act to follow. »

28 Nov 2011

François Couperin by Florilegium, Wigmore Hall

Although François Couperin won his reputation as an esteemed composer at the ostentatious and vainglorious court of Versailles, under the patronage of Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’, his work is often surprisingly discreet and intimate.  »

27 Nov 2011

Tosca, ENO

The swift return to the Coliseum of Catherine Malfitano’s production of Tosca, premiered in 2010, contrasts strongly with the increasingly disposable nature of many recent ENO productions.  »

25 Nov 2011

Saul, Barbican Hall

Handel’s oratorio Saul was the first dramatic oratorio that he wrote with a strong libretto.  »

25 Nov 2011

Xerxes in San Francisco

No cuts, not a single one, nearly four hours of non-stop arias, and its only hit tune happens within the first five minutes. »

23 Nov 2011

The Queen of Spades, Opera North

Opera North holds a special place in my affections: my first full opera in the theatre was the company’s Wozzeck, which I saw as a schoolboy at the Lyceum Theatre in Sheffield.  »

22 Nov 2011

Hugh the Drover Over the Pub

Imagine a tuneful eighteenth-century “ballad opera” of country life, say Stephen Storace’s enduringly popular No Song No Supper, cross it with Cavalleria Rusticana, throw in a bit of Rocky for good measure, and you have some idea of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s first opera, Hugh the Drover, a “Romantic Ballad Opera.” »

20 Nov 2011

Turandot in San Francisco

The magnificent David Hockney Turandot production burst again onto the War Memorial stage with a new cast and conductor that recaptured its potential to make this fairytale into great opera. »

18 Nov 2011

Lucia di Lammermoor, Chicago

Lyric Opera of Chicago staged Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor as its second production of the current season with Susanna Phillips taking on the role of the heroine torn between romantic love and familial pressures.  »

17 Nov 2011

Tricks and Treats, New World Symphony

If this generation were to stake a claim to its own classical vocal music “Golden Age,” Christine Brewer presents a strong case.  »

15 Nov 2011

Eugene Onegin, ENO

Deborah Warner’s new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is an evocative and lyrical depiction of elegiac passion.  »

14 Nov 2011

Dark Sisters, New York

They’re no longer just door-to-door missionaries with a science fiction theology and strange underwear! What with a presidential candidacy and a hit Broadway musical, the Mormons are having their breakout season in New York.  »

14 Nov 2011

Carmen in San Francisco

Déja vu. Well, sort of. Last time around (2006) there was a Carmen and then another who canceled leaving San Francisco Opera in the lurch.  »

13 Nov 2011

Jonas Kaufmann as Werther and Cavaradossi

For some years now the opera world has reveled in the appearance of many fine lyric tenors, with Juan Diego Florez leading the charge.  »

13 Nov 2011

Adriana Lecouvreur, Carnegie Hall

What could be more appropriate for the Samhain season than a return from near-death?  »

09 Nov 2011

Tales of Hoffmann, Chicago

For its first production of the new season, Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Lyric Opera of Chicago assembled a distinguished roster of soloists with the Lyric Opera Orchestra under the direction of Emmanuel Villaume.  »

09 Nov 2011

David Alden directs Cavalli’s Ercole Amante for Amsterdam, 2009

The operas of a composer born before the settlement of Jamestown face dim prospects of getting staged at the larger American houses.  »

09 Nov 2011

Roméo et Juliette, LA

Love and gloom at the Los Angeles Opera.  »

05 Nov 2011

Lieberson’s Neruda Songs and Theofandis’s Symphony No. 1

In 2006 classical music lost one of its great singers — American mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, taken at the height of her career.  »

05 Nov 2011

La sonnambula, Royal Opera

Bellini’s La sonnambula does not have the most gripping or convincing of opera plots: a young girl sleepwalks into a stranger’s room, where she is discovered by her fiancé; disbelieving her pleas of innocence, he jilts her and plans to wed another; but, she is vindicated when she is spied on a nocturnal wander, and the lovers are reconciled.  »

05 Nov 2011

Bluebeard’s Castle, Royal Festival Hall

Bartók’s only opera, a masterpiece to rank with other sole works in the genre such as Fidelio and Pelléas et Mélisande, was chosen for the climax of the Philharmonia’s year-long series, ‘Infernal Dance: Inside the World of Béla Bartók’.  »

05 Nov 2011

Wily Wexford Stays the Course

Wexford Festival Opera made a boldly calculated choice sixty years ago when it eschewed bread-and-butter titles, and instead raided the dusty closet where forgotten pieces by some famous (and mostly non-) composers were (at best) consigned to history. »

04 Nov 2011

Heart of Darkness, Royal Opera

There are some literary texts which, by dint of their intense compression of incident, their creators’ firm control of structure, and the precision of linguistic nuance, do not naturally seem to lend themselves to operatic treatment.  »

01 Nov 2011

Anna Bolena, Metropolitan Opera

It’s very unusual for the Met these days—or any major opera house, in any era—to present a glossy new production with two different stars in the leading role.  »

01 Nov 2011

Castor & Pollux, ENO

Daring dramas which probe dark psychological depths; music that embodies visceral emotional conflicts, and stirs heated, often contradictory, passions; the text and score shaped into radical musico-dramatic structures, employing shockingly inventive harmonic language and orchestral timbres.  »

27 Oct 2011

Renée Fleming and Dmitri Hvorostovsky: A Musical Odyssey in St. Petersburg

Exactly what makes this entertaining, handsome video of Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Renée Fleming in concert an “odyssey”?  »

27 Oct 2011

Pavarotti at the Metropolitan Opera

Luciano Pavarotti died in September 2007, just short of his 72nd birthday and only a few years after his last performance at the Metropolitan Opera, in Tosca.  »

27 Oct 2011

Carmen returns to the Opéra Comique

“Historically Informed Performance” sure has a nice ring — not only does the acronym capture the trendiness of the movement (“HIP”), but one has to admire the subtle put-down the term encapsulates. »

27 Oct 2011

Béatrice et Bénédict, Opera Boston

How is one to write a Romantic opera?  »

26 Oct 2011

Don Giovanni, Metropolitan Opera

According to legend, when composing Don Giovanni, Mozart completed the overture last. It was written the night before the opera’s premiere, while his wife Constanze, a fervent taskmaster, plied him with food and drink to make sure he stayed awake.  »

26 Oct 2011

A Portrait of Manon — Young Artrists at the Royal Opera House

Without young artists, no art form will thrive or grow. The Royal Opera House’s Jette Parker Young Artists scheme nurtures the best from its young artists that their performances attract thoughtful audiences.  »

26 Oct 2011

Don Giovanni in San Francisco

Ossia Maestro Watching in Fog City. Ten years ago it was German provincialism, now it is the Italian sort wanting to take root in the War Memorial Opera House.  »

24 Oct 2011

Der fliegende Holländer, Royal Opera

Wagner’s Flying Dutchman returns to the Royal Opera House, London. »

23 Oct 2011

Renata Pokupić, Wigmore Hall

In this appealing lunchtime recital programme, Croatian soprano Renata Pokupić demonstrated a rich, varied tonal palette and strong communicative skills as she spanned one hundred years of European song.  »

23 Oct 2011

Intertwining facets of Italian High Baroque

‘Erotic oratorio’ is the odd-sounding definition devised by modern scholars, such as Howard E. Smither, for those pious music dramas employing sex-laden plots from the Bible, the Apocrypha or the lives of Saints in order to give the audience moral instruction in a quasi-operatic, if generally unstaged, form.  »

12 Oct 2011

Britten’s War Requiem, London

‘Requiescant in pace. Amen.’  »

12 Oct 2011

Threepenny Opera, Brooklyn

Should I wait until the end of this review to tell you how much fun, how much of a theatrical whoopee cushion Robert Wilson’s production of Die Dreigroschenoper has been at BAM last week?  »

12 Oct 2011

Simon Rattle’s Mahler 9

Recorded between 24 and 27 October 2008 at the Philhamonie in Berlin, this release offers the dynamism of a concert performance with the sound quality associated with EMI’s fine recordings.  »