Recorded on 31 October 2007 in the Grofler Musikvereinssaal, Vienna, this performance of the Cleveland Orchestra offers a compelling interpretation of the three completed movements of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony.
Year: 2011
L’Amour des trois oranges on CD and DVD
Opera companies around the world — though relatively few in the United States — cannot resist the temptation to stage Sergei Prokofiev’s first major opera.
BBC Prom 73: Der Freisch¸tz
Why would a French composer take an opera which epitomises German Romanticism and Nationalism and adapt it to the conventions of the French grand opera tradition?
Munich’s Dialogues des CarmÈlites
Dialogues des CarmÈlites is a magnificently anti-operatic opera.
Santa Fe Faust — Revisited
The distinguished soprano Patricia Racette once advised this observer, “If you are coming to the opera to review me, please attend the latest performance you can.” I knew what she meant.
Operas Based on French Literature
Here are operas based on French literature from Balzac, Hugo and beyond:
Jules Massenet: Le Cid
Le Cid, OpÈra in 4 acts
Les Troyens by La Fura dels Baus
When the opera opens, a chorus of Trojan is rejoicing that the Greeks have abandoned the war and gone home.
Prom 67: Beethoven, Mass in D major, op.123
I shall not beat about the bush: this was a great performance.
Glyndebourne’s Billy Budd
Hermann Melville wrote a poem called “Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the Twelfth Century”: