Recently in Reviews
04 Apr 2011
Proof that literalism isn’t truth: Jürgen Flimm’s production of Beethoven’s Fidelio, first heard at the Met and at the Royal Opera House, London in 2007. »
03 Apr 2011
Florian Boesch and Malcolm Martineau gave the finest recital so far in the Wigmore Hall’s decade by decade series of German Song. »
03 Apr 2011
Victorien Sardou wrote the melodrama La Tosca, a play subject to
all sorts of incidental drama and off-stage intrigue, for Sarah Bernhardt. »
29 Mar 2011
Benedict Andrews’ thought-provoking new production of Claudio
Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, the latest of
English National Opera’s innovative stagings at the Young Vic, juxtaposes
images of unremitting modernity with a tapestry of archaic aural colours, all
placed within an antique frame which resonates with universal emotions. »
28 Mar 2011
Rossini’s penultimate stage work, Le Comte Ory, belongs to
the tradition of sexy scoundrel operas, along with such works as Don
Giovanni, Zampa, Fra Diavolo, Barbe-Bleu,
Les Brigands and Threepenny Opera. »
27 Mar 2011
Adapting an extended literary work for the stage remains a challenge today
and was no less so in the baroque era. Ariosto’s enormously long poem
Orlando Furioso was extremely popular and inevitably his highly
coloured characters found their way onto the operatic stage. »
24 Mar 2011
Opera is alive and well in Sarasota. “It feels like it did before,” says Communications Officer for Sarasota Opera Patricia Horwell. »
23 Mar 2011
An operatic work by an esteemed composer, with a libretto adapted from a great author’s story, staged in an intelligent and well-designed production, featuring singers of the top caliber and a conductor with a deep commitment to the composer’s music, leading a chamber-sized group of his orchestra’s best players — magic in the opera house, right? »
23 Mar 2011
This is an opera written with a cannon and a feather. There is sensory
overload—an overload of sensory overload: lights that shine into your face in
the manner of an ophthalmologist scanning your retina; eerie, too-loud sounds
that invade you from every direction; dancing patterns of light that may
resolve into huge words or huge faces; a great chandelier-harp that sometimes
descends to be played, a strumming like the sounds of the sirens in Plato’s
parable of the concentric crystalline spheres. »
23 Mar 2011
With voices of doom predicting the end of the CD format — supposedly to be replaced by downloading — the ancillary art of CD packaging also faces a grim future. »
18 Mar 2011
Vincenzo Bellini’s operas are pure bel canto, with beautiful singing placed above all other considerations. »
18 Mar 2011
Is Guy Joosten’s staging of Roméo et Juliette the
best-looking production in the Met’s current repertory or what? »
16 Mar 2011
It was, of course, only a coincidence, but a week of ideal spring weather — no rain and low humidity — found Shanghai in a perfect mood for an all-Mahler program by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra on March 12. »
15 Mar 2011
Tchaikovsky’s Pikovaia Dama (The Queen of Spades) is the longest Mad Scene in opera. Ghermann is already half nuts when we meet him in the park in St. Petersburg on a windy day, and he gets crazier from scene to scene. »
15 Mar 2011
Strict courtly hierarchies and the repressed formality of ritual juxtaposed
with violent sexual jealousy and lurid erotic excess … a stage-world
more suited to the Straussian insalubrity of Salomé than to the epic
grandeur of Verdi’s Aida, perhaps? »
15 Mar 2011
It costs a lot to look cheap. And it takes a village to raise a child. In
the case of the Metropolitan Opera’s current revival of Donizetti’s
Lucia di Lammermoor, it takes a lot of talent to produce underwhelming
opera. »
12 Mar 2011
A major label release of a new studio recording of a full opera — with the traditional booklet/libretto — wanders onto the scene almost like a lost and lonely unicorn. »
10 Mar 2011
A key measure of operatic star power is the ability to get an obscure work staged — think Joan Sutherland and her run in Massenet’s Esclarmonde, an outlandish wallow in orchestral excess ladled over a libretto of unfathomable goofiness. »
10 Mar 2011
Francesco Maria Piave’s Italian libretto for Giuseppe Verdi’s
opera La Traviata is based on the French play La Dame aux
Camélias. »
10 Mar 2011
Commanding soprano performances of put-upon heroines securely anchored two recent evenings at the Bastille Opera House.
»
09 Mar 2011
Interesting recordings continue to be produced in the classical music business by smaller labels with particular niche markets. For the label Timpani, their specialty tends to be rarer French repertoire. »
09 Mar 2011
After hearing his stunning Leporello at Glyndebourne and his Figaro at Salzburg, there was no way I was going to miss Luca Pisaroni’s concert with Wolfram Rieger at the Wigmore Hall, London. But I was delighted by how wonderful he sounded close up in recital. »
06 Mar 2011
Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites is an unusual opera, but much sensitive musical thinking has gone into this production at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London. »
06 Mar 2011
Eugène Scribe and Giacomo Meyerbeer were in the business of creating
proto-cinematic spectacles of drama and music, the formula being to take a historical incident in some exotic country or era, put in a tormented love story to hold our attention, and resolve the whole in catastrophe. »
06 Mar 2011
The front leg of the grand piano may rest at a rather precarious angle, and
the out-sized martini glass lean a trifle askew, but Jonathan Miller’s
1986 production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado wears its
twenty-five years lightly — as do Stefanos Lazaridis’
eye-wateringly white, gleaming sets. »
06 Mar 2011
Relaxed, confident and composed, baritone Roderick Williams, accompanied by
pianist Helmut Deutsch, gave a polished and performance before a warmly
appreciative Wigmore Hall audience, performing an interesting selection of
songs by Wolf, Korngold, Mahler and Schumann. »
06 Mar 2011
Little is known about the extent to which Mozart and Da Ponte collaborated on the libretto for Così fan tutte. »
06 Mar 2011
Schubert, but not quite as we know him. You can always rely on the Wigmore Hall to promote adventurous recitals. »
06 Mar 2011
Ariadne on Naxos, or you could call it Bacchus á Bordeaux. It was an orgy of art. »
05 Mar 2011
Neither the music nor the libretto of Charles Gounod’s Roméo et
Juliette is quite compelling enough to have made it a popular standard. »
27 Feb 2011
Gluck’s operas are part of a continuum, a tradition of French vocal
declamation (as opposed to the Italian school of flights of elegant,
open-throated vocal fantasy) that can be traced to him from Lully and Rameau,
and then from Gluck through certain works of Mozart and Gluck’s pupil,
Salieri to the operas of Spontini, Berlioz and Wagner. »
23 Feb 2011
György Kurtág's Kafka Fragments, op 24, is a masterpiece, one of the seminal works of the late 20th century. »
22 Feb 2011
In the mid-nineteenth century, every nationality that did not possess a
national state felt a need to prove itself, to square its shoulders and claim
nationhood with all the identifying marks of a nation: a language with a
literature, a tricolor flag, a national anthem extolling the people’s
stalwart character and the country’s landscape (inevitably the loveliest
in the world), a national theater and a national opera to be performed there. »
21 Feb 2011
Der zerbrochene Krug is a very short opera by Viktor Ullmann, based on a comedy by Kleist, concerning the fall of man. »
20 Feb 2011
The first performance of Thomas Arne’s masque Alfred took
place at Clivedon House on the Thames near Maidenhead, in August 1740. »
20 Feb 2011
This production retains a special place in my heart: its first outing in
1999 was my first Parsifal in the theatre. Saving up my student
pennies, I made the journey not once but twice from Cambridge to London, was
mightily impressed the first time and a little irritated the second. »
18 Feb 2011
From the sublime (Parsifal, the night before) to the not-even-ridiculous. »
17 Feb 2011
The story is ages old, and every culture has a version of it: the mythic
princess of an underwater realm longs for the love of a mortal man. »
15 Feb 2011
Massenet tells us that his Werther is 23 years old, that Charlotte is 20 years old. Albert is 25 and Sophie is but 15. Just now the Lyon Opera assembled just such a cast. »
15 Feb 2011
At the moment, it seems inevitable that John Adams’ 1987 opera Nixon in China will become a fixture in the repertoire. »
12 Feb 2011
Romeo Castellucci is the cat’s whisker of current avant-garde theater directors. Thus it has simply been a matter of time before he would be invited to the Monnaie to stage an opera. »
11 Feb 2011
Although Paris Opéra's Dream Team of soprano Natalie Dessay and director Laurent Pelly promised much for the SRO run of Giulio Cesare in Egitto, for the moment we will have to keep dreaming of what might have been.
»
08 Feb 2011
Witty and airy as an after-dinner anecdote over biscuits and cognac, Don
Pasquale (1844) is, unlikely as it may seem, almost the last opera Donizetti
completed before his descent into the madness of tertiary syphilis. »
07 Feb 2011
In 2010, Florida Grand Opera held a gala to honor Robert Heuer on his 25th
anniversary as general director. »
07 Feb 2011
Preparing for the Met premier of Nixon in China, I resolved to
forget—or place on hold—everything I remembered, or thought I
remembered, about the real persons who are characters in this opera, »
07 Feb 2011
The original story that formed the basis for the libretto of Puccini’s
opera Turandot told of a Mongolian princess who insisted that any
prospective husband endeavor to win a wrestling match with her. »
