It takes some courage these days for an opera company to program a Gian Carlo Menotti opera. Nonetheless last month the OpÈra de Marseille defied current sensibilities to give us a new production of The Saint of Bleecker Street.
Month: March 2010
Les Troyens at Carnegie Hall
Les Troyens is the noblest grand opera ever composed by a Frenchman, one of those desert-island works of which it is impossible to tire because its depths can never be completely sounded.
Concert of Arias by Arizona Opera
Advertised as ‘ A night of powerful music with today’s superstars,’ Arizona Opera’s concert of opera arias definitely lived up to those words.
Katya Kabanova, London
Anguished, lacerating, irredeemably tragic, David Alden’s new production of Katya Kabanova presents a drama of unalleviated suffering and unremitting bleakness.
Debussy’s PellÈas et MÈlisande
Five years after the premiËre of PellÈas et MÈlisande, Wilhelm
Worringer published the twentieth century’s first great treatise on
abstraction in art:
Karl Bˆhm: In Rehearsal and Performance
For many, the fine recordings of Richard Strauss’s tone poem Don Juan by the late Karl Bˆhm seem to have emerged full-spring from the baton of Karl Bˆhm and the playing of the various orchestras he led.
Philip Glass: Satyagraha, ENO, London 2010
Philip Glass’s Satyagraha at the English National Opera, at the Coliseum, London, proves that modern minimalism can be extraordinarily moving. The secret is to open your soul, as Gandhi did, when he searched the Baghavad-Gita for inspiration.
PlatÈe, OpÈra national du Rhin, Strasbourg
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/7f49c7f2-311f-11df-8e6f-00144feabdc0.html