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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27 Aug 2011

Two one-act comic operas from New York Festival of Song

The New York Festival of Song, created and run by Steven Blier and Michael Barrett, dedicates itself to what one might call “American lieder” — art songs by top American composers, classic Broadway, and operatic numbers. »

27 Aug 2011

Mosé in Egitto and Adelaide di Borgogna in Pesaro

It was a no-brainer. The Old Testament Egyptians had to become today’s Palestinians. »

25 Aug 2011

Rossini’s Armida from the Met HD Live

What is to be done about Armida?  »

20 Aug 2011

Donizetti’s Marino Faliero at the 2008 Bergamo Music Festival

Gaetano Donizetti is arguably the established opera composer with the highest ratio of failures to successes.  »

19 Aug 2011

BBC Prom 41

This concert of three substantial choral and orchestral works by Benjamin Britten recreated the ‘50th birthday’ Promenade concert which Britten himself conducted on 12 September 1963.  »

19 Aug 2011

Glimmer, Glamour Back in Cooperstown

A breath of fresh air is making its way through the Glimmerglass Opera festival, and her name is Francesca Zambello. »

19 Aug 2011

Previn and Caird’s Brief Encounter

The chief classical music and opera critic for the Los Angeles Times often criticizes any new operas based on familiar films or classic novels, on the basis of artistic timidity and conservatism.  »

19 Aug 2011

La Bohème at Torre del Lago

This is where Puccini composed many of his operas until the lake got so polluted he had to move to nearby Viareggio.  »

14 Aug 2011

Ariadne auf Naxos, Dell’Arte Opera Ensemble

Today’s general public labors under the unfortunate misconception that in order to enjoy opera, one needs to be educated and at ease with mobility in social circles largely consisting of decrepit old rich people.  »

14 Aug 2011

Opera at Grant Park Music Festival

For its seventh program of the Summer 2011 season the Grant Park Music Festival presented concert ensembles performed by members of the Ryan Opera Center of Lyric Opera of Chicago.  »

14 Aug 2011

Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Wolf Trap

For opera lovers who are serious enough to even think of a performing career, the path is an arduous one.  »

14 Aug 2011

Prom 32: Brahms and Mahler

Brahms’s Violin Concerto and Mahler’s Das klagende Lied did not seem to be the most obvious bedfellows — there has been some rather peculiar programming at this year’s Proms — and even after further consideration, the only real connection I could muster was that they were written at the same time: the concerto in 1878, the cantata between 1878 and 1880.  »

14 Aug 2011

Julia Lezhneva sings Rossini

It seems very appropriate that a record company called Naïve should elect to release a solo recital for a soprano in her very early 20s.  »

14 Aug 2011

Starry-Crossed Lovers in Bavaria

In the waning days of the annual summer festival, Munich’s Bavarian State Opera fielded enough star power to fire up a minor galaxy with its wholly absorbing production of I Capuleti e i Montecchi. »

13 Aug 2011

Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Aleksis Kivi

Great characters are at the center of all operatic masterpieces, yet opera almost never treads into “operatic biography” territory.  »

13 Aug 2011

Théodore Gouvy’s Iphigénie en Tauride

Gounod you know, but how about Gouvy?  »

12 Aug 2011

Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila in Antwerp

Bonus features on opera DVDs usually get generic names, such as “Interview” or “Backstage with…”  »

12 Aug 2011

Gergiev conducts Wagner’s Parsifal

A handsome black steed bows its head, eyes open, peering into the darkness around it. »

12 Aug 2011

Risorgimento 150 years after

How the saga of Italian unification in 1861 is being (half-heartedly) celebrated by opera composers. »

02 Aug 2011

BBC Prom 21

From the bombastic sweeps of Richard Strauss’ Don Juan, to the blissful rhapsodies of Walton’s Violin Concerto, and through the rhythmic surges of Prokofiev’s choral manifesto of socialist realism, conductor Andris Nelsons fizzed — indeed, almost exploded with energy and zest — and inspired clarity, control and freshness from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, on this their only visit to the Proms this season. »

01 Aug 2011

La traviata at the Aix Festival

An appreciation of La traviata plus La clemenza di Tito and Le Nez/The Nose at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. »

01 Aug 2011

La Wally, Opera Holland Park, London

Alfredo Catalani’s La Wally is known for its arias, but the full opera is rarely performed. Expectations were high for this production at Opera Holland Park, London. »

31 Jul 2011

Die Liebe der Danae, Bard Summerstage

In the modern operatic world, respect for the oeuvre of any given composer, as well as his stylistic development and placement in operatic history, is sacrosanct.  »

31 Jul 2011

Rodelinda Triumphs at Iford Opera

Rodelinda is about as serious an opera as any that Handel wrote: attempted regicide and infanticide, violent death, betrayal and a marriage sorely tried.  »

29 Jul 2011

Rigoletto, Opera Holland Park

It’s always a good idea to ferret away a sure-fire winner amongst the rarities, and Opera Holland Park’s Rigoletto certainly meets, and in some aspects surpasses, expectations.  »

28 Jul 2011

Boston Midsummer Opera’s Italian Girl in Algiers

This year’s venture for the annual Boston Midsummer Opera is an elegant reading of Rossini’s fizzy masterpiece of 1813, l’Italiana in Algeri.  »

27 Jul 2011

Rigoletto, Miami Lyric Opera

There’s hell to pay for profligate publicity; Giuseppe Verdi and Francisco Maria Piave knew this to be true.  »

26 Jul 2011

Verdi’s Requiem, BBC Proms

Not only did Verdi’s Requiem make its debut, rather remarkably, in the church of San Marco in Milan but the performance was as a liturgical one; Verdi’s intentions were quite firmly to provide a memorial mass for the Italian patriot, Manzoni.  »

22 Jul 2011

The Sopranos — Dissecting opera’s fervent fans

I was feeling cowed by Herr Engels. The four of us had retired from the Stravinsky performance to a Billy Wilder-themed bar in Berlin, the least horrible late-night option in the high end mediocrity of Potsdamer Platz.  »

22 Jul 2011

Mignon and Saul at Buxton Opera Festival

Buxton, like Wexford, makes a point of offering its clientele the opportunity to sample works that are unjustly neglected by the major houses, and for his final festival as director, Andrew Greenwood served up a typical feast of operatic rarities reflecting the increasingly ambitious approach which has characterised his musical stewardship.  »

19 Jul 2011

Havergal Brian’s “Gothic” Symphony

The BBC Proms has given Havergal Brian’s Symphony no. 1 the best and most extensive exposure the composer has ever enjoyed.  »

18 Jul 2011

Guillaume Tell, BBC Proms

Operatic fashions are fickle and, more to the point, often plain wrong. We all have our grievance lists of works that are ‘scandalously neglected’.  »

16 Jul 2011

First Night of the 2011 BBC Proms

The First Night of the Proms seems to be edging back, if a little hesitantly, from the strange, unsatisfying ‘tasting menu’ approach adopted for a few years.  »

15 Jul 2011

Seven Angels, London

Luke Bedford’s first opera, Seven Angels, had its London premiere at the Linbury Studio Theatre, London.  »

13 Jul 2011

Rinaldo at Glyndebourne

Handel’s Rinaldo at the Glyndebourne Festival is a triumph in musical terms. Don’t miss it when it appears at the BBC Proms this summer in concert performance, because some of the singing is very good indeed. »

12 Jul 2011

Grant Park Music Festival, Chicago Commemorates Gustav Mahler

To commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Gustav Mahler’s death Carlos Kalmar and the Grant Park Orchestra gave in early July two performances of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde featuring the vocal soloists Alexandra Petersamer and Christian Elsner.  »

12 Jul 2011

La rondine, Opera Holland Park

Opera Holland Park’s unique selling point has always been a devotion to the more obscure works of Puccini and his Italian contemporaries.  »

12 Jul 2011

Cendrillon, Royal Opera

Words, stories, books — the gateway to a world of fantasy in which anything is possible.  »

12 Jul 2011

Guillaume Tell, Caramoor Festival

For classical music fans, summer means only one thing: summer festivals. The goal of these festivals is to showcase a wide range of repertory with thought provoking creativity. »

10 Jul 2011

Faust Reaches Santa Fe Opera — And How!

The celebrated New Mexico opera festival has, in its fifty-fifth season, created a production of Charles Gounod’s 1859 masterpiece Faust, its first ever.  »

07 Jul 2011

The Marriage of Figaro, Opera Holland Park

Even before a note was sounded at Opera Holland Park on Saturday evening, the still summer evening was ruffled by a breeze of unease.  »

07 Jul 2011

Scenes from Two Marriages

By 1825, as Rossini’s operatic vein was approaching exhaustion, the Neapolitan Saverio Mercadante ranked as a front-runner for his succession alongside Bellini and Donizetti; much more so, however, in the field of serious drama than in opera buffa.  »

06 Jul 2011

Juan, a film by Kaspar Holten

I recently got the chance to see Juan, the Kaspar Holten film version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, at the Seattle International Film Festival.  »

06 Jul 2011

Der Ring des Nibelungen in San Francisco

Some of the experts said it was the best Ring ever, others merely said it was one of the best (these were lecturers at a Wagner Society symposium). »

30 Jun 2011

Summer Treats in Saint Louis

Opera Theatre of St. Louis has demonstrated yet again that it is an indispensable summer festival to be counted on for adventurous programming, thought-provoking productions, and exciting talent discoveries. »

29 Jun 2011

Sensitive, intelligent Madama Butterfly, Royal Opera

This Madama Butterfly at the Royal Opera House, London, brings out the depth and intelligence of the human story Puccini might be trying to tell us, beneath the surface gloss. »

26 Jun 2011

Two Boys, ENO

You would have had to be deaf and blind — or perhaps just a very wise monkey — not to have been aware that a young American composer called Nico Muhly was about to open at the English National Opera in London last night with a work called Two Boys.  »

26 Jun 2011

Viva Vivaldi — Garsington Opera 2011

Garsington Opera — in its superb new home on the Wormsley estate in rural Oxfordshire — has yet again confirmed the merit of its decision to promote Vivaldi’s long-ignored operas.  »

24 Jun 2011

Lehnhoff takes on Fanciulla for Netherlands Opera

It can be fascinating, although not necessarily pleasant, to see oneself through the eyes of others. »

23 Jun 2011

The Cunning Little Vixen, New York

One of Richard Wagner’s most enduring contributions to music history is a concept known as gesamtkunstwerk.  »

23 Jun 2011

Peter Grimes, Covent Garden

Willy Decker’s production of Peter Grimes, first seen at Covent Garden in 2004, should perhaps be renamed The Borough.  »

21 Jun 2011

Swiss Odyssey

A funny thing happened on the way to Anna Bolena… »

20 Jun 2011

Geneva’s Juicy Oranges

Need something remedial for “what ails you?” »

20 Jun 2011

Boston Early Music Festival: Niobe, Regina di Tebe

The Boston Early Music Festival (hereinafter BEMF) has grown up.  »

20 Jun 2011

Don Pasquale, Opera Holland Park

As it turned out, it was a mild and mainly dry evening.  »

16 Jun 2011

Wagner’s Rienzi in Berlin

The Voltaire maxim usually given in English as “The perfect is the enemy of the good” illuminates the artistic conflicts surrounding many a Wagner production.  »