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.
Year: 2011
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
King Roger at Bregenz Festival 2009
Long-dormant operas sometimes rise to meet a new dawn only to then slink away like the creatures of the night they were doomed to be — seductive but dangerous to approach.