http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/arts/music/simon-keenlyside-at-alice-tully-hall-review.html?_r=1&ref=music
Year: 2011
Gheorghiu and Domingo in Giordano’s Fedora
A major label release of a new studio recording of a full opera — with the traditional booklet/libretto — wanders onto the scene almost like a lost and lonely unicorn.
Cecilia Bartoli in HalÈvy’s Clari
A key measure of operatic star power is the ability to get an obscure work staged — think Joan Sutherland and her run in Massenet’s Esclarmonde, an outlandish wallow in orchestral excess ladled over a libretto of unfathomable goofiness.
La Traviata, Phoenix
Francesco Maria Piave’s Italian libretto for Giuseppe Verdi’s
opera La Traviata is based on the French play La Dame aux
CamÈlias.
Two Troubled Girls in Paris
Commanding soprano performances of put-upon heroines securely anchored two recent evenings at the Bastille Opera House.
DÈodat De SÈverac: Le Coeur du Moulin
Interesting recordings continue to be produced in the classical music business by smaller labels with particular niche markets. For the label Timpani, their specialty tends to be rarer French repertoire.
Luca Pisaroni at the Wigmore Hall, London
After hearing his stunning Leporello at Glyndebourne and his Figaro at Salzburg, there was no way I was going to miss Luca Pisaroni’s concert with Wolfram Rieger at the Wigmore Hall, London. But I was delighted by how wonderful he sounded close up in recital.
Dialogues des CarmÈlites, Guildhall, London
Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des CarmÈlites is an unusual opera, but much sensitive musical thinking has gone into this production at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London.
L’Africaine, OONY
EugËne Scribe and Giacomo Meyerbeer were in the business of creating
proto-cinematic spectacles of drama and music, the formula being to take a historical incident in some exotic country or era, put in a tormented love story to hold our attention, and resolve the whole in catastrophe.