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.
Month: April 2009
Don Giovanni at the MET with Peter Mattei
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.
Walter Braunfels’s Die Vˆgel at Los Angeles Opera
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.
Barbers in Baghdad and Seville
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.
Gounod’s RomÈo et Juliette at Salzburg, 2008
In 2008 the Salzburg Festival intended to bring back the two stars of their triumphant 2005 La Traviata, Rolando VillazÛn and Anna Netrebko, for Gounod’s RomÈo et Juliette.
Il Piccolo Marat
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.
Prokofiev’s SemÎn Kotko Lands in Sardinia
The Teatro Lirico di Cagliari is a sparkling comparatively new building in what used to be a blighted area near to the city center.
Jen?fa at the Bavarian State Opera
The Bavarian State Opera’s new production of Leos Janacek’s Jenufa is a feather in the cap of intendant Nikolaus Bachler.
Lost portrait of Handel’s librettist Paolo Rolli resurfaces in Todi, Italy
Paolo Antonio Rolli (Rome, 13 June 1687 — Todi, 20 March 1765) arguably ranks among the top-three Italian librettists of the 18th century, next to Metastasio and — later — Da Ponte.