Frankfurt Opera’s adventurous season had a notable beginning with a luminous staging of Samuel Barber’s seldom heard Vanessa.
Year: 2012
Moby Dick in San Francisco
Forget Herman Melville, forget struggling with deep human complexities. At least those that possessed nineteenth century Americans.
I Due Foscari, LA Opera
Lucky Angeleno opera lovers! In anticipation of the Giuseppe Verdi’s bicentennial (it will occur in 2013) Los Angeles Opera treated its patrons to a unique and musically thrilling performance of I Due Foscari, the sixth of the composer’s twenty-six operas.
Die Zauberflˆte, ENO
‘The last-ever performances of Nicholas Hytner’s production of The Magic Flute,’ claims the programme.
Florian Boesch on Schubert’s Die schˆne M¸llerin
Florian Boesch is singing Schubert’s Die Schˆne M¸llerin at the Oxford Lieder Festival on Sunday 14th October. This won’t be routine. Radically challenging conventional interpretation, Boesch says “I don’t believe it ends in suicide”
Don Giovanni, LA Opera
In our era of minimal cultural restraints Don Giovanni has been the opera of choice for presenting dissolution on stage. Rape, oral sex, drug use and urination have been portrayed to Mozart’s melodies.
I Capuleti e i Montecchi in San Francisco
Give me good verses, I’ll give you good music, said Bellini to his librettist Felice Romani. Give me a good director and I’ll give you good opera surely thought San Francisco Opera general director David Gockley.
Stockhausen’s Mittwoch, Birmingham Opera Company
The first performances of Stockhausen’s Mittwoch — the world premiere took place on Mittwoch 22 August, the composer’s birthday, whilst I attended the last of four performances on Samstag — could hardly have failed to be an ‘event’ of the highest order: the last of the Licht cycle, in duration roughly twice the length of Wagner’s Ring, to receive its first full performance, though it was the sixth of the seven days to be composed.
Rewriting the Unwritten Law: Gilliam and Ghent Tackle Damnation
One of the most noteworthy and controversial productions in recent memory
arrived in Belgium with hurricane force as Director Terry Gilliam’s inaugural
opera, an inspired interpretation of Hector Berlioz’s Le Damnation de
Faust, blasted into Ghent, followed by a run in Antwerp.