For the second time in a matter of just a few weeks, the Wigmore Hall
audience were treated to an evening of seventeenth-century song and dance.
Month: April 2011
Anne Sofie von Otter, Wigmore Hall
Rigoletto, New York
Rigoletto is the perfect opera. Even Verdi, who wrote so many
wonderful scores, never created anything more flawless.
Sumeida’s Song
It has long been my belief that the problems of the planet would be resolved
(or move on to their next stage) if only the folk of every ethnicity (nation,
faith, historic minority, tribe) would devote their energy to creating
opera—and perhaps theater or dance—out of its musical and mythical
traditions.
Salome, Grosses Festspielhaus, Salzburg Easter Festival
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/d45ecf90-6bce-11e0-93f8-00144feab49a.html#axzz1MpT5AwTw
The Magic Flute, Manitoba
It’s hard to go wrong with The Magic Flute. Mozart’s
final opera contains every audience-pleasing feature in spades: beautiful
music, a fairy tale story, romance, laughter, villains, heroes/heroines, and
for most — a happy ending.
Minnesota Opera rescues Herrmann work
There’s more Byron than BrontÎ in Bernard Herrmann’s 1951
Wuthering Heights.
Otello, Carnegie Hall
By the time he emerged from retirement with Otello, his
twenty-seventh opera, at 73, there wasn’t much Giuseppe Verdi
didn’t know about how to make an orchestra do his bidding, set the mood
of each line of a good story, piling excitement on excitement and letting the
tension mutate to something gentler at the right times in order to make the
outburst to follow the more demoniac.
A Dinner Engagement
Trust Winnipeg’s resourceful Little Opera Company to come up with a little known, yet charmingly entertaining spring production.
Cyrano, Florida Grand Opera
To enter into David DiChiera’s space as he talks opera shop is to risk
being pulled into his world, rapt by a tractor beam emitting a constant flow of
music theater load.