Wagner’s Flying Dutchman returns to the Royal Opera House, London.
Month: October 2011
Renata Pokupić, Wigmore Hall
In this appealing lunchtime recital programme, Croatian soprano Renata Pokupić demonstrated a rich, varied tonal palette and strong communicative skills as she spanned one hundred years of European song.
Intertwining facets of Italian High Baroque
‘Erotic oratorio’ is the odd-sounding definition devised by modern scholars, such as Howard E. Smither, for those pious music dramas employing sex-laden plots from the Bible, the Apocrypha or the lives of Saints in order to give the audience moral instruction in a quasi-operatic, if generally unstaged, form.
Opera North’s Queen of Spades – in pictures
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/gallery/2011/oct/20/opera-north-queen-of-spades-in-pictures
Threepenny Opera, Brooklyn
Should I wait until the end of this review to tell you how much fun, how much of a theatrical whoopee cushion Robert Wilson’s production of Die Dreigroschenoper has been at BAM last week?
Simon Rattle’s Mahler 9
Recorded between 24 and 27 October 2008 at the Philhamonie in Berlin, this release offers the dynamism of a concert performance with the sound quality associated with EMI’s fine recordings.
Sallinen’s The Red Line at Finnish National Opera, 2008
Some opera masterworks are admirable more than lovable — a distinction usually best revealed by the number of performances the work gets.
La Traviata and the Credit Crunch
One way of thinking about La Traviata is to consider it as a portrayal of bubble wealth that makes artistic capital from the shimmering, rainbow hues of the surface rather than showing any interest in what sustains the bubble.
Mahler 8, Royal Festival Hall
Following Lorin Maazel’s lifeless first movement from Mahler’s Tenth Symphony