The Barbican’s six-month series celebrating the English oratorio, has now reached Mendelssohn’s Elijah — or perhaps we should
follow the Victorians and refer to it as ‘the Elijah’, given that it was performed in English, in William Bartholomew’s translation.
Year: 2012
Elijah, Barbican Hall, London
Abduction from the Seraglio, Philadelphia
Abduction from the Seraglio contains not a single ironic or cynical moment. Enlightened mercy and sincere love triumph totally over revenge, slavery and tyranny.
Paris: Tenors Trump Befuddled Productions
Two recent outings at the Paris OpÈra might have been subtitled: “Max Bialystock is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.”
Zurich’s Magnificent ‘Other’ Moor
Right to the musical ‘score’ board: Zurich Opera stared down the mighty challenge posed by Rossini’s Otello ossia il moro di Venezia, and knocked it out of the ballpark.
Mazeppa in Monte-Carlo
Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa is not everyday repertory, nonetheless here in the south of France the Monaco production follows fairly closely (a couple of years) on the heels of the Peter Stein Mazeppa in Lyon.
Previn conducts the LSO in the 1970s
AndrÈ Previn’s leadership of the London Symphony Orchestra in the early 1970s resulted in some highly regarded recordings, including one of the classic accounts of Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony.
Giuseppe Verdi: Aida
A perennial favorite among opera enthusiasts since its 1871 premiere in Cairo, Aida remains a popular work, and its strengths are apparent in the recent Decca DVD from the Metropolitan Opera, New York.
Simon Boccanegra, LA
Sometime everything seems to go right. Just as the Los Angeles Opera Company
did last fall, it opened its spring season with a baritonal eponymous opera; this time, Giuseppe Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra.