Recently in Reviews
11 Dec 2010
Cecilia Bartoli is something of a phenomenon, capable of attracting an enthusiastic capacity crowd. »
06 Dec 2010
The Barbican’s Great Performers season often acts as a receiving house for continental opera productions, thus giving us in London a chance to hear interesting performances without actually having to travel. »
06 Dec 2010
Transplanting Britten’s Shakespeare opera to an Indian setting seems at first an illogical step by Hollywood director Baz Luhrmann. »
03 Dec 2010
With its tricky ‘orientalist’ connotations, Singspiel-originating spoken dialogue, not to mention the problem of finding five outstanding singers who can cope with the considerable demands of the solo roles (and the commercial challenge presented by the need to pay a chorus who sing barely a few bars of music), Mozart’s Die Entführung aus den Serail does not receive as many stagings as it deserves. »
03 Dec 2010
In a seamless realization with an ideal cast Lyric Opera of Chicago celebrates the magical antics and foibles of both human and fairy in its premiere production of Benjamin Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. »
03 Dec 2010
It may be as well to put matters in context by saying that Don Carlo is a
favorite opera of mine (and of all Verdi lovers), and that I found the Met’s new staging highly satisfactory, vocally very good if less than top flight, orchestrally thrilling—and that I hope to catch it again this
season. (Interesting rumors have been heard about the alternate tenor.) »
01 Dec 2010
Philip Glass has achieved a level of success that places him in a very select group of composers of serious music. »
29 Nov 2010
Not revived too frequently this 1991 production by Elijah Moshinsky updates the story to the 1960s and the films of Federico Fellini inspire the sets and costumes. »
29 Nov 2010
Neil Armfield’s insightful staging of Le nozze di Figaro is making a welcome return in the lead-up to his direction of the Ring Cycle for the Wagner bi-centenary 2013 (the first complete cycle staged in Melbourne in a century). »
23 Nov 2010
Three cheers — at the very least — for the English National Opera! »
23 Nov 2010
What some people won’t do for a standing ovation! Saturday night at the opera was a showcase of excesses. »
21 Nov 2010
Two months into the current season, after a string of so-so revivals and a curiosity which deserved to be box-office dynamite but wasn’t, the Royal Opera has finally got round to a star-studded new production. »
20 Nov 2010
Just now in San Francisco Finnish soprano Karita Mattila kicked ass as Janáček’s 337 year old Elina Makropulos.* »
19 Nov 2010
On Saturday November 13 and Sunday November 14, 2010, Arizona Opera presented Bernard Uzan’s rather different take on Bizet’s Carmen. »
19 Nov 2010
As I strolled around the corner into Piazza Verdi, my first view of Palermo’s Teatro Massimo Vittorio Emanuele stopped me dead in my tracks and damn near took my breath away.
»
18 Nov 2010
Ondine provides a nice bonus for fans of Karita Mattila in its recent DVD release of a 2006 Helsinki recital with accompanist Martin Katz. »
18 Nov 2010
Can Haiku be improved by staging? György Kurtág's Kafka-Fragmente (op. 24), is a masterpiece of zen-like purity. »
11 Nov 2010
Our modern globalized perspective makes us alert to the cultural richness of difference, much as it ironically also seems to blur distinctions with ease of access. »
10 Nov 2010
The commemorate the sesquicentennial of Mahler’s birth in 1860, EMI has released an exceptional set of its recordings in a single box. »
08 Nov 2010
A career of the highest stature earns the professional the right to do as she or he pleases, after decades of dedicated achievement. »
08 Nov 2010
There’s nothing wrong with updating an opera as long as the director,
designer and conductor share an understanding of the work’s principal ideas and motivations, conflicts and contexts, and have a clear vision of how they intend to communicate these in a new setting. »
08 Nov 2010
It’s difficult to be reasonable about Il Trovatore. Reason is the last quality we expect from any of its characters or situations. »
07 Nov 2010
Minnesota Opera’s recent production of Rossini’s La Cenerentola certainly is a fantastical, comical portrayal of the classical fairy tale. »
07 Nov 2010
Pace Tolstoy, happy marriages are not all alike, but they
require a lot of work. »
07 Nov 2010
Angelika Kirchschlager and Malcolm Martineau at the Wigmore Hall showed what real Lieder singing should be. »
03 Nov 2010
The small but perfectly formed Grosvenor Chapel in London’s exclusive Mayfair was the venue last Monday night for a programme of Handel vocal and instrumental music of considerable quality — if minimal quantity. »
03 Nov 2010
For its second production of the current season Lyric Opera of Chicago has staged a modified revival of its Carmen under the direction of Harvey Silverstein. »
02 Nov 2010
After a rather lean 2009, the 59th Wexford Festival Opera season almost felt
like a return to generous days of old. »
02 Nov 2010
Franco Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac at the San Francisco Opera has little chance of measuring up to a Cyrano standard once set here in Fog City. »
02 Nov 2010
Haydn’s L’isola disabitata is ideally suited to the modern taste for chamber opera. This is Haydn for those who think they don’t like his operas or even baroque form. »
01 Nov 2010
Clearly, there isn’t one. Yet, Carl Heinrich Graun’s 1755
rarely-performed Montezuma is of special importance in a country
celebrating 200 years of Independence from Spanish rule and 100 years since the
Revolution that ultimately toppled dictator Porfirio Díaz. »
29 Oct 2010
A great vintage Mercury album of Antal Dorati conducting Wagner overtures and preludes featured as a cover a close-up of a medieval chalice, undoubtedly meant to reference the Parsifal excerpt on the enclosed disc. »
29 Oct 2010
“Don’t I have the coolest job in the world?” said Steven Blier. »
28 Oct 2010
We all come to the opera for different things. To escape, to elevate, to laugh, to cry, or perhaps because someone else bought the tickets. »
27 Oct 2010
Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette is almost more musical than opera. Everyone knows the story, and it would be hard to compete with Shakespeare. Gounod wisely focused on music, rather than drama. »
24 Oct 2010
The last curtain call at the opera usually goes to the title character, the star of the work just performed. At the end of the Met’s new Boris Godunov, the calls begin with a solo call for the title character, René Pape as Boris, and conclude with one for the Metropolitan Opera Chorus all by themselves. »
24 Oct 2010
On 16 October 2010 in Tucson, Arizona Opera opened it’s 2010-2011
season with an operetta, The Pirates of Penzance, by W. S. Gilbert and
Arthur Sullivan. »
24 Oct 2010
It’s every opera director’s nightmare. »
24 Oct 2010
The fall opera season in San Francisco has been dealt a wild card — Jerry Springer, The Opera! Not exactly material for SF’s august opera company . . . »
24 Oct 2010
The 50th anniversary of the Metropolitan Opera at the Lincoln Center is just a few years away, so, with something less than dispatch, a DVD of the 25th anniversary Gala appears. »
24 Oct 2010
An American opera house premieres a new work by a Mexico-born composer, to his own libretto in Spanish based on a film in Italian by an English director about an unlikely friendship the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda found when in exile on a small Italian island. »
24 Oct 2010
ENO clearly expect high returns from Jonathan Miller’s La Bohème. »
24 Oct 2010
“One of the most beautiful sets I have ever seen,” crows San Francisco Opera general director David Gockley over the airwaves, “directed by Broadway legend Hal Prince.” »
24 Oct 2010
Paris Opéra’s L’Italiana in Algeri had a lot going for it, including a star mezzo in her local debut, so why was I resistant to its merits? »
24 Oct 2010
Kirsten Flagstad’s voice remains connected to the music of Richard Wagner through the recordings that continue to bring her performances to new audiences. »
21 Oct 2010
In sports they say, “Winning isn’t the most important
thing—it’s the only thing.” In the theater, getting the show
on the boards out front is the key. »
17 Oct 2010
The “popular” Handel is firmly entrenched in the collective
culture with a handful of pieces: the Christmas portion of Messiah,
the “Largo” from Serse (in fact, “Larghetto,”
but collective culture is hard to convince), and instrumental suites of the
Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks come
immediately to mind. »
16 Oct 2010
Jephtha was Handel’s last work — he went blind while
composing it, noting this on the manuscript, and though he lived another seven
years, did not deign to dictate new music. »
16 Oct 2010
Dame Joan Sutherland, ‘La Stupenda’, sang her first Gilda at Covent
Garden in 1957 under the baton of Sir Edward Downes, and sang the role many times and to great acclaim on the ROH stage. »
13 Oct 2010
A successful production of Verdi’s Macbeth relies not only on
incisive vocal characterization as projected by Macbeth and Lady Macbeth but
also on the interaction of these lead figures in order to vivify their descent
into a world of destruction. »
13 Oct 2010
With its playbill half-empty, its general director Placido Domingo
resigning, and the talk of a takeover by the Kennedy Center, Washington
National Opera is in a dire need of good news this season. »
