12 Aug 2011
How the saga of Italian unification in 1861 is being (half-heartedly) celebrated by opera composers. »
02 Aug 2011
From the bombastic sweeps of Richard Strauss’ Don Juan, to the
blissful rhapsodies of Walton’s Violin Concerto, and through the rhythmic
surges of Prokofiev’s choral manifesto of socialist realism, conductor Andris
Nelsons fizzed — indeed, almost exploded with energy and zest — and
inspired clarity, control and freshness from the City of Birmingham Symphony
Orchestra, on this their only visit to the Proms this season. »
01 Aug 2011
An appreciation of La traviata plus La clemenza di Tito and Le Nez/The Nose at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. »
01 Aug 2011
Alfredo Catalani’s La Wally is known for its arias, but the full opera is rarely performed. Expectations were high for this production at Opera Holland Park, London. »
31 Jul 2011
In the modern operatic world, respect for the oeuvre of any given composer, as well as his stylistic development and placement in operatic history, is sacrosanct. »
31 Jul 2011
Rodelinda is about as serious an opera as any that Handel wrote: attempted regicide and infanticide, violent death, betrayal and a marriage sorely tried. »
29 Jul 2011
It’s always a good idea to ferret away a sure-fire winner amongst the rarities, and Opera Holland Park’s Rigoletto certainly meets, and in some aspects surpasses, expectations. »
28 Jul 2011
This year’s venture for the annual Boston Midsummer Opera is an elegant reading of Rossini’s fizzy masterpiece of 1813, l’Italiana in Algeri. »
27 Jul 2011
There’s hell to pay for profligate publicity; Giuseppe Verdi and Francisco Maria Piave knew this to be true. »
26 Jul 2011
Not only did Verdi’s Requiem make its debut, rather remarkably, in the church of San Marco in Milan but the performance was as a liturgical one; Verdi’s intentions were quite firmly to provide a memorial mass for the Italian patriot, Manzoni. »
22 Jul 2011
Buxton, like Wexford, makes a point of offering its clientele the opportunity to sample works that are unjustly neglected by the major houses, and for his final festival as director, Andrew Greenwood served up a typical feast of operatic rarities reflecting the increasingly ambitious approach which has characterised his musical stewardship. »
18 Jul 2011
Operatic fashions are fickle and, more to the point, often plain wrong. We all have our grievance lists of works that are ‘scandalously neglected’. »
16 Jul 2011
The First Night of the Proms seems to be edging back, if a little hesitantly, from the strange, unsatisfying ‘tasting menu’ approach adopted for a few years. »
15 Jul 2011
Luke Bedford’s first opera, Seven Angels, had its London premiere at the Linbury Studio Theatre, London.
»
13 Jul 2011
Handel’s Rinaldo at the Glyndebourne Festival is a triumph in musical terms. Don’t miss it when it appears at the BBC Proms this summer in concert performance, because some of the singing is very good indeed. »
12 Jul 2011
To commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Gustav Mahler’s death Carlos
Kalmar and the Grant Park Orchestra gave in early July two performances of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde featuring the vocal soloists Alexandra Petersamer and Christian Elsner. »
12 Jul 2011
Opera Holland Park’s unique selling point has always been a devotion to the more obscure works of Puccini and his Italian contemporaries. »
12 Jul 2011
Words, stories, books — the gateway to a world of fantasy in which anything is possible. »
12 Jul 2011
For classical music fans, summer means only one thing: summer festivals. The goal of these festivals is to showcase a wide range of repertory with thought provoking creativity. »
10 Jul 2011
The celebrated New Mexico opera festival has, in its fifty-fifth season, created a production of Charles Gounod’s 1859 masterpiece Faust, its first ever. »
07 Jul 2011
Even before a note was sounded at Opera Holland Park on Saturday evening, the still summer evening was ruffled by a breeze of unease. »
07 Jul 2011
By 1825, as Rossini’s operatic vein was approaching exhaustion, the
Neapolitan Saverio Mercadante ranked as a front-runner for his succession
alongside Bellini and Donizetti; much more so, however, in the field of serious
drama than in opera buffa. »
06 Jul 2011
I recently got the chance to see Juan, the Kaspar Holten film version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, at the Seattle International Film Festival. »
06 Jul 2011
Some of the experts said it was the best Ring ever, others merely
said it was one of the best (these were lecturers at a Wagner Society
symposium). »
30 Jun 2011
Opera Theatre of St. Louis has demonstrated yet again that it is an indispensable summer festival to be counted on for adventurous programming, thought-provoking productions, and exciting talent discoveries. »
29 Jun 2011
This Madama Butterfly at the Royal Opera House, London, brings out
the depth and intelligence of the human story Puccini might be trying to tell
us, beneath the surface gloss. »
26 Jun 2011
You would have had to be deaf and blind — or perhaps just a very wise
monkey — not to have been aware that a young American composer called
Nico Muhly was about to open at the English National Opera in London last night
with a work called Two Boys. »
26 Jun 2011
Garsington Opera — in its superb new home on the Wormsley estate in
rural Oxfordshire — has yet again confirmed the merit of its decision to
promote Vivaldi’s long-ignored operas. »
23 Jun 2011
One of Richard Wagner’s most enduring contributions to music history is a concept known as gesamtkunstwerk. »
23 Jun 2011
Willy Decker’s production of Peter Grimes, first seen at
Covent Garden in 2004, should perhaps be renamed The Borough. »
21 Jun 2011
A funny thing happened on the way to Anna Bolena… »
20 Jun 2011
Need something remedial for “what ails you?” »
20 Jun 2011
The Boston Early Music Festival (hereinafter BEMF) has grown up. »
20 Jun 2011
As it turned out, it was a mild and mainly dry evening. »
15 Jun 2011
Israel Opera’s summer festival grew astonishingly in the year following its 2010 inaugural season. »
14 Jun 2011
It would seem that in his preparations for this new production of Simon
Boccanegra, the acclaimed Russian director, Dmitri Tcherniakov, has been
familiarising himself Jonathan Miller’s previous ENO efforts. »
14 Jun 2011
Think verismo and one imagines melodramatic, often violent plots which peer unflinchingly into the soul of every character. »
12 Jun 2011
The current Tosca at the Royal Opera House is something of a classic, revived four times in five years. It’s now being filmed for cinema to be released in November 2011. »
09 Jun 2011
It was a lucky happenstance that glorious vocalism characterized Badisches
Staatstheater’s La Gioconda, for effective stagecraft was nowhere in evidence…but, oh, what singing!
»
09 Jun 2011
A capacity crowd at the Wigmore Hall eagerly awaited the arrival of Andreas Scholl and Tamar Halperin on the platform on Tuesday evening. »
07 Jun 2011
‘Glitter and be gay!’ cries Cunegonde, determined to overcome the bitter circumstances in which she finds herself in sordid, downturn Paris. »
06 Jun 2011
The U.S. premiere of Hans Werner Henze’s Phaedra at the Opera Company of Philadelphia may well be the most important and ambitious new work presented by any American company this season. »
01 Jun 2011
Any performance of Brahms and Schumann four part songs is an occasion. »
30 May 2011
“Music, music for a while/ Shall all your cares beguile,” vowed Ian Bostridge at the opening of this recital with his regular accompanist, Julius Drake. »
30 May 2011
This is the one by Giorgio Strehler that opened at Versailles in 1973 and since has endured twenty-three incarnations, first at the Garnier and later at the Bastille. »
27 May 2011
It’s easy to slip into platitudes when eulogising the last London
recital performance of a singer commonly lauded as the outstanding countertenor
of his generation. »
26 May 2011
Teatro Grattacielo gives concert performances of Verismo operas that range from the obscure to the unheard-of. »
26 May 2011
Phyllida Lloyd’s reading of Verdi’s Macbeth –
first seen in 2002 and here revived for the second time – could certainly
not be described as ‘subtle’, either dramatically or visually. »
24 May 2011
Glorious sunshine for Glyndebourne Opera’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg on the eve of Richard Wagner's birthday. »
23 May 2011
André-Modeste Grétry, the greatest opera composer ever to come from Belgium, made his way to Paris in 1767 at the age of 26. »
23 May 2011
On my travels, I often hear occasional opera-goers complain about having wasted time and money on a production that, on the night, bears no relation to their expectations. »
22 May 2011
The Washington National Opera has concluded its 2010-11 season with
Gluck’s 1779 masterpiece Iphigénie en Tauride, arguably the
great Viennese composer’s greatest achievement and his swan song (if one
does not count that unfortunate flop of 1780, Echo et Narcisse —
and luckily, one hardly ever does). »
22 May 2011
James MacMillan has reunited with his librettist, the poet Michael Symmons Roberts, to produce his new opera Clemency. »
21 May 2011
By Leporello’s count (in the “Catalogue aria”), Don
Giovanni tallies over 2,000 sexual exploits. »
18 May 2011
Gluck’s Orfeo is, intentionally, free of clutter. If you cut
out the scenes of balletic rejoicing just before the finale (and I can’t
think of any good reason not to do so), it’s less than ninety minutes of
music. »
18 May 2011
There’s a lot to be said for lowered expectations. After last
fall’s cramped, over-busy staging of Das Rheingold, I was
prepared for a rough night at Die Walküre—and enjoyed the
occasion very much, the staging, the direction, most of the singing, even the
costumes. »