Recently in Reviews
13 Nov 2008
“This won’t be a total Schlacht of sound” said the director, Charles Edwards, of this production. Instead, it’s a strikingly intelligent interpretation, focusing on the deeper aspects of the drama. »
13 Nov 2008
It is incredibly unfashionable nowadays to stage opera straightforwardly. Welsh National Opera’s recent lavish staging of Otello prompted a dismissive reception from the critics. »
09 Nov 2008
There are remnants of snobbery in San Francisco that are happiest when San Francisco Opera
associates itself with the likes of Vienna State Opera and Covent Garden, and left positively
frightened at the idea of a production from Opera Colorado/Fort Worth Opera/et al. on the War
Memorial Opera House stage. »
09 Nov 2008
EMI owns this recording, so if pride dictates they repackage it in the "Great Recordings of the Century" series, a dissenter shouldn't moralize. »
09 Nov 2008
Both these performances come from mid-2005. Teatro Regio di Parma presented the Ernani in May of that year; August saw I Capuletti e I Montecchi on stage at the Festival della Valle d'Itria di Martina Franca. »
09 Nov 2008
Countless must be the number of true opera fans who have heard well-meaning acquaintances say, "Oh I just love opera! Especially Phantom of the Opera." »
07 Nov 2008
The current revival of Georges Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers at Lyric Opera of Chicago (seen 25 October) brings together an exceptionally strong cast. »
07 Nov 2008
In 1830, three years after the death of Beethoven and two after Schubert’s untimely demise, Berlioz, 27, dazzled the world with his phantasmagoric — perhaps drug-inspired — Symphonie fantastique. »
04 Nov 2008
As performed just now by the San Francisco Opera Mussorgsky’s initial (1869), seven scene version of Boris Godunov revealed itself a finished masterpiece. »
04 Nov 2008
Of their two tours per year, English Touring Opera tends to channel the majority of the budget into the Spring season, and the Autumn tour – despite a focus in recent years on some high-quality Baroque chamber works, which lend themselves well to the size of the venues around the UK which the company visits – can be rather noticeably the poor relation. »
04 Nov 2008
“Opera directing is very different to theatre directing”, says Charles Edwards, director of Elektra at the Royal Opera House this season. “It has to be the music that motivates you”. For this production, he works with Mark Elder, “an extraordinarily theatrically-minded conductor who sees theatre in everything he hears”. »
02 Nov 2008
A few years ago EMI released a recording of Wagner duets with Placido Domingo and Deborah Voigt. »
02 Nov 2008
What opera contains a terrific overture, a wedding sextet, two murderous magical potions, a mad scene for coloratura soprano, a magnificent a cappella aria for contralto, dozens of glorious melodies and lots of nifty choral writing? »
02 Nov 2008
I was just itching to experience the new Oslo Opera House ever since I saw the pictures of its grand opening (ahead of schedule, thank-you-very-much) last April. »
02 Nov 2008
Is Boston Baroque period performance’s best kept secret? »
31 Oct 2008
Mary Zimmerman’s unmusical production of Lucia certainly improves if you give it a cast of singers who know what Donizetti is about. »
31 Oct 2008
The fascination of Don Giovanni lies not only in the bejeweled score but in the interplay of its eight intriguing characters, each based on an ancient type, yet each somehow cut loose from the formula da Ponte molded so well. »
30 Oct 2008
While the tributes and retrospectives continue to appear for the late Luciano Pavarotti, his sometime-colleague (if not rival) Plácido Domingo maintains a top-rank career, even including a contract with Deutsche Grammophon for new studio work. »
30 Oct 2008
Gala may be a budget label, but more opera sets of vintage live performances deserve a booklet essay as concise yet comprehensive, critically honest and yet fair, as Andrew Palmer's for this set, which preserves a 1980 performance of Richard Strauss and Joseph Grigor's Die Liebe der Danae. »
24 Oct 2008
Pimlico Opera is based at the Grange in Hampshire, home of the Grange Park opera festival, but pre-dates its sister company by a decade and has been giving national tours of popular operas since the 1980s as well as doing some pioneering opera and music theatre projects in UK prisons. »
24 Oct 2008
Bach’s monumental Mass in b minor exists in an abundant quantity of period performances to the point where one might ponder the wisdom of adding yet another to the shelf. »
24 Oct 2008
The good news (make that “great news”) is that conductor Dennis Russell Davies had total command over this ever-shifting composition, one minute lyrical and introspective, the next soaring and rhapsodic, the next percussive and agitated. »
23 Oct 2008
In recent years it’s the headgear of the ice-hearted princess that is often the major source of awe and excitement in productions of Puccini’s incomplete final opera. »
23 Oct 2008
Joanot Martorell’s 1490 “Tirant lo Blanc” isn’t on anyone’s reading list these days, and that’s rather a shame, for it — the first Catalan novel — was a favorite book of Miguel de Cervantes. »
21 Oct 2008
Munich in 1781 was hardly the big city, not an enlightened Paris where Gluck had recently turned the opera world on its ear, not a European capital like Vienna where Italian operatic imperialism was unassailable. »
21 Oct 2008
“One can easily imagine -- Berkeley professor Donald J. Grout wrote in 1979 -- a Scarlatti oratorio occasionally being sung in church or in concert […], but it is more difficult (though perhaps not quite impossible) to imagine a Scarlatti opera being staged at a modern opera house”. »
21 Oct 2008
In this new staging of Handel's comic rarity for English National Opera, director Christopher Alden has chosen to tell the classical tale of amorous and political intrigue through the world of the artistic elite of the 1920s/30s. »
21 Oct 2008
Staging La traviata for an opera company these days is an experience akin to that of a symphony’s orchestra programming Mozart: a great idea fraught with disaster. »
21 Oct 2008
We ought to consider – as opera’s current reigning soprano, Karita Mattila, has certainly considered, though I’m not so sure about director Jürgen Flimm – who, what, and how old Salome is. »
21 Oct 2008
It probably wasn’t intended as a symbol of anything in particular, but at the end of Act II, midway through the October 6 performance of La Gioconda, Enzo’s ship failed to burst into flames, thereby letting the curtain down most unsatisfactorily on what is usually one of the liveliest act finales in grand opera. »
21 Oct 2008
By the time he completed Le Roi d’Ys, in 1888, Edouard Lalo was sixty-five, approaching the end of a successful career as a chamber violinist. »
21 Oct 2008
A funny thing happened on the way to the convent. Manon Lescaut, a pretty little girl with a taste for pretty things, became sidetracked by a pretty young man. »
20 Oct 2008
There is much to admire in Masaaki Suzuki’s Bach performances with the Bach Collegium Japan, and this recording of excerpts from the St. Matthew Passion will remind the listener of the diverse ways in which this is so. »
20 Oct 2008
Among the recent releases on DVD of Rolf Liebermann's productions of operas from the Hamburg Opera conceived for television in the late 1960s, Beethoven's Fidelio is impressive for the use of the medium of film to bring out the personal aspects of this intensive opera. »
08 Oct 2008
For the opening of the 2008/09 season at ENO, Richard Jones has teamed up with two separate theatrical writers, Sean O'Brien and Lee Hall, to create unique new versions of the repertoire's most famous double bill. »
06 Oct 2008
Presented in its fine line of “Originals,” Decca’s reissue of Solti’s famous 1967 recording of Verdi’s Requiem is actually offered with another fine recording, the same conductor’s 1977/78 performance of the Quattro pezzi sacri. »
06 Oct 2008
In recent years, Emmanuelle Haïm has achieved prominence at the helm of several baroque operas, including Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo and Handel’s Rodelinda and Giulio Cesare. »
06 Oct 2008
It can be difficult to inject life into a production which has been a staple of a company’s repertoire for over twenty years. »
06 Oct 2008
If Munich’s new Macbeth production does anything, it stirs emotions and draws heated response. »
06 Oct 2008
Decades ago a New Yorker cartoon showed a very little girl standing on tip-toe to return a book to a matronly librarian. »
03 Oct 2008
Korngold’s third opera Die tote Stadt premiered in 1920 in Cologne, the composer a mere 23 years old. Back then, opera remained a living art form, with the likes of Strauss and Puccini keeping the public excited about new works. »
29 Sep 2008
The second offering of the current WNO season is a San Diego Opera production of Georges Bizet’s Pearl Fishers (1863). »
28 Sep 2008
Planet Earth laid waste by forces beyond our control, hunger and drought squeezing humanity out of existence whilst those in charge look on, laughing, lusting and concerned only with their own power struggles – does this sound familiar? »
22 Sep 2008
Musically and dramatically Ferdinando Paer’s Leonora and Beethoven’s Fidelio might be said to belong respectively to pre- and post-revolutionary ages. »
22 Sep 2008
A few seasons back, Los Angeles Opera invited William Friedkin to direct a double-bill of Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle and Puccini's Gianni Schicchi. »
22 Sep 2008
Although Jacobus Vaet, Antonius Galli and Pieter Maessens are little-known composers today, this impressive recording featuring their music, the debut recording by the ensemble Cinquecento, may serve as a cautionary reminder that modern familiarity is often the fruit of circumstance and not necessarily a reliable measure of artistic achievement. »
