Anguished, lacerating, irredeemably tragic, David Alden’s new production of Katya Kabanova presents a drama of unalleviated suffering and unremitting bleakness.
Year: 2010
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
A Midsummer Night’s Dream by ETO
A silvery tree stretched its gnarled branches across the moonlit stage, and from the briar and bush spiky, feathered fairies wriggled and crept, intent on mischief and malevolence.
The Nose, New York
When the orchestra re-tuned itself between the intermissionless acts of the Met premiere of The Nose last week, many in the audience were uncertain whether they were hearing practice or prelude.
Verdi’s Attila, New York
The curtain rises on an enormous pile of crumbling reinforced concrete,
broken wires sticking out every which way – an image that has replaced
(at least in the minds of set designers) the romantic columned or castellated
ruins that thrilled our ancestors, especially around the time, 1846, that Verdi
composed Attila.