Every major opera company needs a production of La bohËme. It is one of the operas which has the potential to attract everyone, the work which will tempt the occasional opera goer into the theatre.
Month: October 2012
A New Production of Elektra at Lyric Opera of Chicago
The opening images of Richard Strauss’s Elektra in its new production at Lyric Opera of Chicago establish a tension persisting until the final chords of the score indeed signal a resolution of this familial tragedy.
Amsterdam’s Skin Show
Netherlands Opera is surely to be numbered among the world’s most adventurous international companies.
Lohengrin in San Francisco
Exquisite pianissimos, sumptuous climaxes, gigantic fortes, insistent horns, sugary winds, tremulous brass, blasting trumpets, whispering strings, pulsating oboes, more gigantic fortes, even more sumptuous climaxes.
Parsifal bears its own Cross
Parsifal, with its heavy dose of religiosity and strains of racial supremacy, remains at once the most mystical and historically burdened of Wagner’s operas.
Don Giovanni at ENO
Some especially puerile, needlessly irritating, marketing, involving
pictures of condom packets — oddly chosen in so many ways, since few
people find contraceptive especially erotic, and Don Giovanni would seem an
unlikely candidate to have employed them — had attended the run-up to this
revival of Rufus Norris’s production of Don Giovanni.
Mozart and Salieri — Young Artists at the Royal Opera House
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Mozart and Salieri (1897) received its first ever performance at the Royal Opera House as the highlight of Meet The Young Artists Week at the Linbury Studio Theatre.
Where the Wild Things Are, LA Philharmonic
An opera called Where the Wild Things Are based on a libretto by Maurice Sendak may sound like a mere treat for children, but when paired with the music of Oliver Knussen, as performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in a new and unique production by Netia Jones, it makes for a forty minute joy ride into fantasy land for adults as well.
To Rome With Love: A Woody Allen film
What might a Woody Allen treatment involving opera read like? Tosca, third act — the firing squad lets loose shrapnel from a malfunctioning prop carbine, verily cutting into the Cavaradossi.
Lucia di Lammermoor at Arizona Opera
The role of Lucia in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor was written for Fanny Tacchinardi Persiani who lived from 1812 to 1867.