A recent addition to Valery Gergiev’s Mahler cycle with the London Symphony Orchestra, the SACD recording of the Third Symphony has much to recommend.
Month: January 2011
The Magic Flute and La Traviata, New York
The dust on 65th Street is clearing up and the reviews for the renovated Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts are in — the piazza is being hailed as newly “inviting” by architects and arts critics alike, and rightly so.
Tosca, Metropolitan Opera
They have been fiddling with Luc Bondy’s staging of Tosca. Scarpia doesn’t masturbate on the Madonna; he just sort of pinches her erotically.
The Art of the Countertenor
Since he first came to notice a few years ago — in Messiah in this very hall, as Creonte at Covent Garden, and as Arsace in Partenope at New York City Opera, to name by a few recently acclaimed performances — many a starry accolade has been heaped upon young Welsh countertenor, Iestyn Davies: “achingly beautiful tone”,“unforgettable focus and poignancy” and “compelling sense of rhetoric” are typical of the bountiful superlatives.
Ghost Opera & A Chinese Home
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/ghost-opera–a-chinese-home-20110113-19pwy.html
Taking Gilbert & Sullivan Seriously
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703779704576073913819798464.html
Simon Boccanegra, Bologna 2007
This beautifully realized production of Verdi’s somber masterpiece of political intrigue and father/daughter reconciliation could be a complete success except for one missing element — memorable singing.
NY Phil/AdËs/Hampson, Avery Fisher Hall, New York
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/6d922412-1cdf-11e0-8c86-00144feab49a.html#axzz1B32F4Jxp