Recently in Reviews
12 May 2009
By sheer coincidence, the Academy of Santa Cecilia — one of the most authoritative symphonic orchestras in Europe — planned a rather unusual concert in the same days (May 3-7) when just in the very same auditorium there was the world première of a movie expected to be a Hollywood blockbuster — the thriller titled “Angels & Demons”. »
12 May 2009
For two years following its premiere Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsesnk was one of the most often performed contemporary operas. »
12 May 2009
Soprano Kate Royal is reported to have said that singing at the Wigmore Hall is “like a religious experience”. »
12 May 2009
Recorded four years apart, these two classic recordings of Leos Janáček's dramatic masterpieces now reappear in Decca's The Originals series, thankfully still with full librettos and excellent booklet essays. »
12 May 2009
Christine Brewer Commands Performance in Last Minute Appearance »
07 May 2009
Doris Sennefelder's booklet essay for this CPO recording of Lehar's Das Land des Lächelns details how close the composer was to Puccini. »
05 May 2009
It’s an odd day in opera when the bad girl wins, but that is only one thing that makes the Opera Atelier production of Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppea remarkable — and admirable. »
03 May 2009
April 29th is Zubin Mehta’s birthday. As a gift to its most beloved musical director, Florence unveiled a new production of Götterdämmerung, a joint Ring Cycle venture with the Valencia Opera started two years ago. »
29 Apr 2009
From the word “go”, the audience feels that this “Maria Stuarda” is quite different from the standard fare offered by Italian theatres. »
29 Apr 2009
I first saw this production in Manchester in 1981: I loved it then and love it now, despite the present hero’s un-Heldentenor qualities when compared to the glorious Peter Hoffman of yore. »
26 Apr 2009
One of the five operas Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876-1948) based on plays by Carlo Goldoni, La vedova scaltra (1748) is a comedy about a widow’s decision to use deception to choose among her suitors. »
26 Apr 2009
I returned to Don Giovanni firstly because I had never heard Peter Mattei sing, and friends had called him the greatest Don G since Siepi. »
26 Apr 2009
The Recovered Voices series at Los Angeles Opera, in its second season, springs from James Conlon’s fascination and love for the operas of composers whose lives and/or careers came to an end under the Nazi regime. »
26 Apr 2009
Razor-wielding rascals involve themselves in romantic complications in the two sets considered here, with a fine performance of a rarity and an even finer performance of a classic.
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26 Apr 2009
In 2008 the Salzburg Festival intended to bring back the two stars of their triumphant 2005 La Traviata, Rolando Villazón and Anna Netrebko, for Gounod's Roméo et Juliette. »
26 Apr 2009
Try to imagine the scenario: You’re an opera company, giving concert
performances of neglected, indeed forgotten, hundred-year-old scores (no sets, no costumes, at least you don’t have those headaches), and you give young singers a chance to do their stuff once a year before a paying New York crowd actually eager to hear music they do not know, and you’ve lit on a genuine obscurity, even in the ranks of the obscure; Mascagni’s penultimate stage work, a huge success at the premiere (as his operas usually were), utterly forgotten nowadays (as, but for Cavalleria Rusticana and, on rare occasion, L’Amico Fritz, they pretty much are), and it’s never been performed in North America ever. »
24 Apr 2009
The Teatro Lirico di Cagliari is a sparkling comparatively new building in what used to be a blighted area near to the city center. »
22 Apr 2009
The Bavarian State Opera’s new production of Leos Janacek’s Jenufa is a feather in the cap of intendant Nikolaus Bachler. »
19 Apr 2009
In the continuing series of releases to document the recorded legacy of the Staatskapelle Dresden, vol. 13 collects music by Hans Pfitzner and Richard Strauss with performances from 1939 through 1944. »
19 Apr 2009
In its new production of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) Lyric Opera of Chicago has achieved a fusion of eighteenth-century sensibilities with a modern adaptation of traditional dramatic and stage techniques. »
19 Apr 2009
Perhaps I’d better just describe what I experienced, Captain. »
19 Apr 2009
The Los Angeles Opera audiences seem to have decided that no matter how they may really feel about Achim Freyer’s “performance art” staging of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, the singers and musicians are giving them at long last a chance to hear these monumental works at the Dorothy Chandler. »
19 Apr 2009
Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s music drama Die tote Stadt has had a rather erratic life in major opera houses. »
19 Apr 2009
On a stormy evening in Houston (both in and outside of the house), Houston Grand Opera’s opening night production of Verdi’s Rigoletto went off with a thunderous bang. »
19 Apr 2009
Schubert’s music ‘suggests a rippling movement and by the side of the rippling a flowering: it has the variety and unsurprising naturalness of moving water and springing herb’ (Capell) and this same naturalness and sense of flowing ease are the very qualities which make John Mark Ainsley such a special interpreter of this composer. »
19 Apr 2009
Rome’s opera house was built in 1880, in the explosion of building that followed the unification of Italy with Rome as its capital. »
10 Apr 2009
Rigoletto is the ideal first opera: a taut tale, comprehensible characters, terrific tunes, and not an ounce of fat anywhere. »
10 Apr 2009
Was Tony Kushner’s monumental play Angels in America in need of being musicalized? »
08 Apr 2009
This two-CD budget series collection brings together two Placido Domingo Wagner recitals, the first from 2000, with Deborah Voigt receiving co-billing, and the second from 2002. »
07 Apr 2009
Originally directed by Brooks Riley for German television, this updated staging of Engelbert Humperdinck’s familiar opera Hänsel und Gretel is based on a production created by Johannes Felsenstein, the son of the well-known director of the Komische Oper Berlin, Walter Felsenstein. »
07 Apr 2009
The current revival of Cav and Pag at the Met went off like clockwork, with all the comfort and reliability that implies for a repertory house and all the success these tried and true verismo stalwarts merit. »
07 Apr 2009
London: Sue Loder reviews Alessandro and the Handel Singing Final »
06 Apr 2009
I cursed myself for not having turned on the television sooner. »
06 Apr 2009
In the parlance of a Hollywood film pitch, Britten's penultimate opera might be described as "War Requiem" meets "Turn of the Screw." »
06 Apr 2009
Like Violetta Urmana, Nadja Michael had a substantial career as a mezzo before deciding to venture into soprano territory. »
02 Apr 2009
William Kentridge is a South African artist who works in charcoal and eraser (smudges) on paper, in small animated film and video segments (black and white), in theater, and now in opera. Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses was his first operatic project that took place in 1998 in collaboration with South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Theater. »
01 Apr 2009
In the current weak economy many an opera company has retrenched its programming to present primarily the most popular operas. »
01 Apr 2009
If combining the anniversaries of both Purcell and Handel in one production at the Royal Opera was something of a master-stroke, then getting the Royal Ballet in on the act must have seemed to be verging on the brilliant from a commercial point of view. »
31 Mar 2009
When considering his next recording project, notes Rolando Villazón, the idea of working on a set of Handel arias with Paul McCreesh was “not an obvious choice.” »
30 Mar 2009
Mention Macbeth — The Opera and most think of Verdi. Ernest Bloch took on the subject more than half a century later, in Paris in 1910, when Verdi’s version was almost as obscure as Bloch’s is today. »
30 Mar 2009
Many works by Martinů will be performed in this year’s commemoration of the anniversary of his death, but it would be hard to equal the impact of this performance. Much of its success was due to Kožená, whose presence illuminated the whole opera, even though her moments on stage were fleeting. »
29 Mar 2009
Naïve re-releases the soundtrack to the film Farinelli here in a handsome “book” casing, appending a second disc of highlights from the discography of Christophe Rousset’s recordings with Les Talens Lyriques, the artists also responsible for the soundtrack. »
27 Mar 2009
In the world of opera it’s now the director who is the top banana. »
25 Mar 2009
Janáček enthusiasts in London have been spoiled this month: opening the day before English Touring Opera’s Katya Kabanova, David Alden’s staging of Jenůfa made a welcome return to the Coliseum following its original double Olivier Award-winning run in 2006. »
25 Mar 2009
Seven discs, of 170 tracks, amounting to over eight hours of music - this EMI set somehow manages to be both voluminous and narrow in its portrait of Paul Robeson. »
25 Mar 2009
I had been looking forward to it for weeks — really, for years. »
25 Mar 2009
In 1831, when Vincenzo Bellini composed this pastorale full of characters who never express any but sincere emotions (with the exception of Lisa, the calculating flirt), he certainly intended them, and their feelings, and therefore their story, to be taken seriously – or he would not have given them such seriously lovely music. »
