Recently in Reviews
12 Oct 2011
Some opera masterworks are admirable more than lovable — a distinction usually best revealed by the number of performances the work gets. »
12 Oct 2011
One way of thinking about La Traviata is to consider it as a portrayal of bubble wealth that makes artistic capital from the shimmering, rainbow hues of the surface rather than showing any interest in what sustains the bubble. »
12 Oct 2011
Following Lorin Maazel’s lifeless first movement from Mahler’s Tenth Symphony »
10 Oct 2011
The Los Angeles Opera Company’s charmingly understated new production
of Così fan tutte will please your eyes and delight your ears, but its story might grieve your romantic soul. »
07 Oct 2011
There are two ways to sing the role of Carmen: as a “grand opera” heroine and as a character from opéra-comique. »
05 Oct 2011
As long as one keeps in mind that historical value is not the same as aesthetic quality, this DVD of early 1960’s live German TV performances of two short Gian Carlo Menotti operas makes for fascinating viewing. »
03 Oct 2011
The haughty beauties that are the ancient colleges of Cambridge were definitely feeling the heat this past weekend, and not even the cooling streams of the Cam and its tributaries could assuage the heat of an Indian summer in the Fens of Eastern England. »
02 Oct 2011
Kudos to the Los Angeles Opera Company for expanding its heretofore limited
Russian repertoire and opening its 26th season with Tchaikovsky’s
Eugene Onegin. The romantic work based on the novel in verse of the
same name by Alexander Pushkin, is likely everyone’s favorite
Tchaikovsky opera. »
30 Sep 2011
Love and Death is the name of one of Woody Allen’s earlier films, one built around parodies of Tolstoy and other Russian 19th century literary giants. »
30 Sep 2011
My response to much of this and last year’s Mahler anniversary bonanza
has been to stay away: certainly not out of antipathy, nor out of boredom, nor on account of any other negative reaction to the music of a composer whom I admire as greatly as ever, but simply because there are too many unnecessary performances of that music on offer. »
28 Sep 2011
When the Royal Opera House London does things well, it does them very well indeed. This Gounod’s Faust was a sizzler!
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28 Sep 2011
Bad news travels fast. Though you are about to read another version of how American diva Renée Fleming failed to bring Lucrezia Borgia alive, let us begin by discussing a few other things you already know. »
28 Sep 2011
What better way for the long-reigning director of the Vienna State Opera, Ioan Holender, to celebrate the end of his time in the post than with a lengthy gala featuring such stars as Gergely Németi, Roxana Constantinescu, Krassimira Stoyanova, and Keith Ikaia-Purdy? »
28 Sep 2011
Among recent recordings of Britten’s opera Billy Budd, the recent
release conducted by Daniel Harding has much to offer in terms of performance
quality, interpretation, and also the quality of recording. »
28 Sep 2011
In 1989, William Christie’s ten-year-old Paris-based baroque troupe, Les Arts Florissants, brought a staged production to the Brooklyn Academy of Music for the first time, Lully’s Atys. »
26 Sep 2011
Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber presented Schubert’s song cycles at the Wigmore Hall, London. »
23 Sep 2011
Frederick Delius counts among those many composers whose reputations rely on their orchestral efforts, but who dearly wanted to make a lasting contribution to the opera repertory. »
23 Sep 2011
Lawrence Zazzo’s last visit to the Wigmore Hall, in April earlier this year, saw him present an intriguing sequence of American song from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. »
22 Sep 2011
The circumstances behind Mieczysław Weinberg’s The Passenger at the ENO, London, are extraordinary. »
21 Sep 2011
In a program of Italian and French arias and duets Lyric Opera gave to
Chicago audiences a preview of the first operas in its forthcoming season and
an opportunity to hear familiar voices as well as those soon destined to grace
the operatic stages of the world. »
21 Sep 2011
Los Angeles has been good to Turandot. The gritty 1984 Andre Serban production inaugurated an opera company in Los Angeles where a mere eight years later L.A. Opera bestowed the splendid Luciano Berio ending upon the world in an uber-pompous Gian-Carlo del Monaco production. »
21 Sep 2011
Whether or not one agrees with Joseph Kerman’s immortal definition of
Tosca as a “shabby little shocker,” Puccini’s
melodramma, the inaugural production of the Washington National
Opera’s 2011-12 season, is intense, “blood-and-guts” kind of
entertainment. »
21 Sep 2011
What do a ferociously violent melodrama, an ecstatic spiritual revelation and an ironic black farce have in common? »
21 Sep 2011
It’s easy to dismiss the undoubted charms of Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love with a wry smile and a dash of condescension. »
21 Sep 2011
As one of the most successful Italian opera composers of the late-eighteenth
century, Domenico Cimarosa’s reputation lasted well into the following
century during which his operas were staple repertoire in all the major
European opera houses. »
21 Sep 2011
Stylish, spirited vocalism that rang convincingly through the Palais Garnier was the hallmark of Paris Opera’s thrilling revival of one of Mozart's least appreciated mature operas.
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21 Sep 2011
As a rule the celebrated incomplete operas of the repertory eluded completion due to the untimely death of the composer. »
21 Sep 2011
While the music industry seems to be spiralling dementedly downmarket, the Wigmore Hall keeps standards extremely high. »
21 Sep 2011
The house lights dimmed, SFO General Director David Gockley instructed us to stand and sing the Star Spangled Banner. This crucial moment revealed the intentions and complexities of this fine production at San Francisco Opera. »
19 Sep 2011
The Wigmore Hall is the most respected centre of art song excellence in Britain and its Song Competition attracts interest from all over the world.
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15 Sep 2011
Recorded on 31 October 2007 in the Großer Musikvereinssaal, Vienna, this performance of the Cleveland Orchestra offers a compelling interpretation of the three completed movements of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. »
15 Sep 2011
Opera companies around the world — though relatively few in the United States — cannot resist the temptation to stage Sergei Prokofiev’s first major opera. »
13 Sep 2011
Why would a French composer take an opera which epitomises German Romanticism and Nationalism and adapt it to the conventions of the French grand opera tradition? »
12 Sep 2011
Dialogues des Carmélites is a magnificently anti-operatic opera. »
10 Sep 2011
The distinguished soprano Patricia Racette once advised this observer, “If you are coming to the opera to review me, please attend the latest performance you can.” I knew what she meant. »
09 Sep 2011
When the opera opens, a chorus of Trojan is rejoicing that the Greeks have abandoned the war and gone home. »
08 Sep 2011
I shall not beat about the bush: this was a great performance. »
08 Sep 2011
Hermann Melville wrote a poem called “Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the Twelfth Century”: »
06 Sep 2011
Bochum’s Jahrhunderthalle, a massive, re-purposed industrial building, seemed an unlikely location to contain and frame the transcendent, unbounded spiritual journey of Wagner’s masterpiece Tristan und Isolde. »
06 Sep 2011
Superstitions surround theatrical productions of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy. »
01 Sep 2011
In its final performances of the Summer 2011 season the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus along with guest soloists gave two performances of Verdi’s Requiem. »
30 Aug 2011
Droughts, deserts, false gods, angels, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis and a firestorm. Plenty of drama in the Bible. In BBC Prom 58, Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort and Players made a good case for period performance of Mendelssohn’s magnificent Elijah op 70.
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30 Aug 2011
Newsflash: Wartburg is a world-wide recycling company, at one with the universe, wherein everything and everyone exists in a perfectly sustainable environment.
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30 Aug 2011
Film biographies of great musicians notoriously exhibit a preference for talking heads nattering on over any music passages. »
29 Aug 2011
It’s becoming rather a fashion to set operas in English public schools. »
29 Aug 2011
When discussing the evolution of opera as a genre, the towering figure of Richard Wagner cannot be ignored. »
29 Aug 2011
“The number of recordings testify to the continuing popularity of
Donizetti’s melodrama in two acts [L’elisir d’amore], which rivals Don Pasquale among his comic operas and is often rated the better on account of its superior libretto by Felice Romani.” »
28 Aug 2011
In 2008, the late Richard Hickox, founder and then music director of the City of London Sinfonia, commissioned a work from composer Colin Matthews to celebrate the orchestra’s 40th anniversary, which takes place this year. »
27 Aug 2011
As this is written, the third week of August, the Santa Fe music season is winding down. »
27 Aug 2011
Superb performance of Elgar’s epic oratorio Caractacus at the The
Three Choirs Festival in Worcester Cathedral. »
27 Aug 2011
Musical excellence was the centerpiece of three of Santa Fe Opera’s annual offerings. »
27 Aug 2011
The back cover of soprano Nino Machiadze’s debut solo recital from Sony Classical quotes her as describing the disc’s selection of arias as “my world, my successes to date and my hopes for the future.” »
27 Aug 2011
In keeping with the festival nature of the piece, the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus, along with guest soloists and a guest chorus director, gave two performances of Franz Schmidt’s Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln on recent weekend evenings. »
