Don Carlo: Opera in four acts.
Year: 2009
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.
Pfitzner and Strauss by Staatskapelle Dresden
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.
Die Entf¸hrung aus dem Serail at Chicago Lyric
In its new production of Mozart’s Die Entf¸hrung 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.
Cavalli’s La Didone at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn
Perhaps I’d better just describe what I experienced, Captain.
Die Walk¸re at Los Angeles Opera
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.