Recently in Reviews
29 Jan 2010
Melodic and scenic gaiety predominates in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s new
production of Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow. »
28 Jan 2010
The Times used to have a music critic who seemed to feel that singing,
especially in costume, didn’t count as serious music, though he reviewed
opera anyway. »
25 Jan 2010
Covent Garden has revived director Robert Lepage’s popular and well-traveled version of The Rake’s Progress with often thrilling results. »
25 Jan 2010
We all wish Henry Purcell had written a few more operas like Dido and
Aeneas — simple to cast, simple to stage, offering endless
possibilities for either reserved or outrageous treatment, attractive to every
sort of audience. »
22 Jan 2010
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, around 1777, the Empress Maria
Theresa used to visit Prince Esterhazy’s summer palace at Esterhàza,
where there was an opera house fully equipped with stage machinery, leading
singers, an orchestra, and a guy named Joseph Haydn to compose on cue. »
22 Jan 2010
While Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) is best known to modern audiences for his colorful programmatic works associated with Italian locations, his vocal music is also engaging. »
19 Jan 2010
Robert Stuart Thomson’s Italian language learning text, Operatic Italian, promises to become an invaluable textbook for aspiring operatic singers, voice teachers, coaches and conductors. »
18 Jan 2010
Stiffelio was composed just after Luisa Miller — an opera that has had little trouble holding its own in the repertory — and just before the magic trio of Rigoletto, Trovatore and Traviata, the first Verdi operas to take their immediate place on the stages of the world and hold them without a break from that day to this. »
18 Jan 2010
Most musical of mourners, weep anew!
Not all to that bright station dared to climb
And happier they their happiness who knew
Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time »
18 Jan 2010
Concert performances of operas are often problematic in that the work tends to be cut or otherwise played around with, or the venue is inappropriate - after all, these were meant to be staged pieces. »
17 Jan 2010
Elina Garanča conceals her gleaming gold tresses beneath a curly black wig to sing Carmen. »
17 Jan 2010
The Opéra National de Montpellier sometimes rises to artistic heights, and even when it fails its attempts are often interesting. »
14 Jan 2010
Are you sitting comfortably? »
08 Jan 2010
Well into the 1960s, ‘provincial theaters’ were the backbone of Italy’s operatic culture. »
07 Jan 2010
Rare repertory but not truly rare, Massenet’s Cendrillon makes an appearance from time to time. »
29 Dec 2009
David Agler must be feeling a trifle unlucky. Having in 2005 taken over the reins of a flourishing, internationally renowned opera festival, with a stylish new opera house in the planning and the Irish economy booming, his hopes must been high; but in the event the Canadian’s first few years as Artistic Director of the Wexford Festival Opera have been far from plain-sailing. »
18 Dec 2009
The roles Richard Strauss composed for his “chorus” of Five Serving Maids in Elektra — all that remains in the opera of the commentator chorus in Sophocles’ tragedy — are short but arduous. »
18 Dec 2009
Productions of Giuseppe Verdi’s early opera Ernani have become relatively infrequent primarily because of the difficulties of casting the work requiring four demanding roles. »
18 Dec 2009
Exchanging the stage of The Royal Opera House — where he is currently
performing the role of His Highness in Tchaikovsky’s fairy-tale opera,
The Tsarina's Slippers — »
18 Dec 2009
Encountering Frankfurt Opera’s staging of Leoni’s L’Oracolo and Puccini’s Le Villi, I was reminded of that old saw about the German weather. »
18 Dec 2009
It is hard to know where to start to adequately laud Netherlands Opera’s witty new La Fanciulla del West. »
18 Dec 2009
The one thing certain about the judgment of history is that history will change its mind. »
15 Dec 2009
Il Corsaro, the Verdi rarity currently on display at Zürich Opera, is the best of both possible worlds. »
11 Dec 2009
This disc faces a marketplace already crowded with similar compilations from major companies who can raid their archives to offer competitive interpretations at bargain prices. »
11 Dec 2009
Emma Matthews is an English born soprano currently resident in Australia where she has sung with the state based opera companies as well as the national company Opera Australia where she is currently a soloist. »
11 Dec 2009
The Tales of Hoffmann is a cruel piece, for all the wit of the macabre tales on which it is based and the sparkle the dying Offenbach put into his last and grandest score. »
11 Dec 2009
Musically, Australia looks to Britain and Europe, especially for its operatic diet and America’s considerable operatic output has been overlooked. »
10 Dec 2009
In dark, damp December we need good cheer, and Der Rosenkavalier at the Royal Opera House, delivers colour and spectacle. in abundance. It's a revival of the John Schlesinger production from 1884, and somewhat antiquated, but that's no disadvantage, for the passage of time haunts Der Rosenkavalier. »
08 Dec 2009
Spearheaded by a stunning design concept for The Tsarina’s Slippers, London’s Covent Garden served up as delectable a production as could be desired, and introduced its lucky patrons to a jewel of an under-performed comic opera in the bargain. »
06 Dec 2009
For its second production of the 2009-10 season Lyric Opera of Chicago staged a revival of Charles Gounod’s Faust, last seen here in 2003-04. »
04 Dec 2009
The best news about the Met’s eleven-year-old Jonathan Miller
production of Le Nozze di Figaro is that it has been restaged by
Gregory Keller, more tautly spun, many elegant jokes or character moments
inserted, several idiocies discarded and with plenty of room remaining for
singers with a flair for it (such as Luca Pisaroni and Isabel Leonard) to
invent comic business of their own. »
02 Dec 2009
Sir Peter Hall created this production of Otello at Chicago Lyric Opera in 2001. »
01 Dec 2009
ENO did not exactly ‘import a choir of Heathens’ to encourage the Shaws of this world to ‘hasten’ to its version of ‘Messiah’ ‘if only to witness the delight of the public and the discomfiture of the critics,’ the contribution of ‘Heathens’ in musical terms being limited to representing the populace of an initially grey Britain (or so I assume) but for every critic who was discomfited — most of us — there were hundreds of audience members who loved it, so it’s fairly safe to predict a considerable hit. »
30 Nov 2009
Mark Padmore and The English Concert took us on a journey from the dark depths of melancholy to the ethereal transcendence of joy, in a display of consummate artistry at the Wigmore Hall. »
27 Nov 2009
The question that puzzled me when attending Esther was Why. »
24 Nov 2009
Ralph Locke’s recent book on Musical Exoticism is both an historical survey of aspects of the exotic in Western musical culture and a discussion of paradigms of the exotic and their relevance for musicological understanding. »
24 Nov 2009
Like most opera companies, the Mozart/da Ponte trifecta of Figaro,
Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte are central to Opera
Australia’s repertoire. »
24 Nov 2009
There was a certain inevitability about the build-up to Iestyn Davies’ recital at the Wigmore Hall in London last Wednesday. »
17 Nov 2009
In the mid-1980s (just before the Riccardo Muti era began), Lorin Maazel often ruled the conductor's roost at La Scala. »
17 Nov 2009
Leoš Janáček’s From the House of the Dead is a
very odd duck to find on the stage of a grand opera house. »
15 Nov 2009
London has long been spoiled in the operatic rarity department, thanks to companies like Opera Rara, Chelsea Opera Group and University College Opera populating various areas of the Venn diagram that is obscure repertoire. »
12 Nov 2009
Hindemith’s Das Marienleben has a formidable reputation, but is rarely heard. Soile Isokoski could change all that. This cycle is a tour de force, but tours de force need singers capable of achieving them. »
11 Nov 2009
The worlds of lieder and opera seem to share the same galaxy, while being countless light years apart. »
11 Nov 2009
Wagner was last on stage in Houston’s Wortham Theater Center in 2001, when the Houston Grand Opera staged Tannhäuser. »
11 Nov 2009
The December opening of the La Scala season requires a notable production, and in 2001 a gorgeous new production of Verdi's Otello fit the bill. »
10 Nov 2009
This grueling production of Bartok’s operatic masterpiece, Duke
Bluebeard’s Castle, clearly did not set out to retain any of the
ambiguity and mystery of the fairytale which inspired it. »
09 Nov 2009
If Herbert von Karajan conducted Madama Butterfly and Maria Callas sang Isolde it follows that Nicola Luisotti should conduct Salome. »
09 Nov 2009
As an interpreter of Benjamin Britten, Philip Langridge has long been
esteemed as the natural successor to Peter Pears; »
04 Nov 2009
Unlike many contemporary composers — who too often derive their operas from full-length novels — William Bolcom (whose first opera, to be fair, was the novel-based McTeague, which I do not know) based his second, »
04 Nov 2009
Rio de Janeiro, which has had a string of winning luck in recent days — not only will it host the 2014 World Cup of soccer, but also the 2016 Olympic Games — continues a laudable and venerable tradition in the arts — the Biannual Festival of Contemporary Brazilian Music, now in its 18th edition. »
