The economics of the recording companies dictate much that is not ideal.
Wagner’s operas were not composed as they were in order to permit the
extraction of bleeding chunks, even on those occasions when strophic song forms
do occur.
Month: April 2013
Kaufmann Wagner
The Marriage of Figaro Ends Season at Arizona Opera
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro has a libretto by Lorenzo daPonte based on the French play La folle journÈe, ou le Mariage de Figaro (The Crazy Day or the Marriage of Figaro) by Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799).
Baden’s Flute Goes Barefoot in the Park
For its world class Easter Festival, Baden-Baden mounted a Die Zauberflˆte that owed more to the grey penitential doldrums of Lent than to the unbridled jubilance of re-birth.
Bonjour M. Gauguin in Berkeley
Once Berkeley Opera, renamed West Edge Opera, this enterprising company offers the Bay Area’s only serious alternative to corporate opera, to wit Bonjour M. Gauguin.
Mahler Lieder, Wigmore Hall
In the first of pianist Julius Drake’s three-part series,
‘Perspectives’, our gaze was directed at Gustav Mahler’s eclectic musical
responses to human experiences: from the trauma and distress of anguished love
to the sweet contentment of true friendship, from the agonised introspection of
the artist to the diverse dramas of human interaction.
Cinderella Goes to the Opera
The Los Angeles opera company marketed its spring production of Rossini’s La Cenerentola as Cinderella though there is no opera by that name. The libretto of La Cenerentola is not the Cinderella story we know.
Music from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“German poet, dramatist and novelist. One of the most important literary and cultural figures of his age, he was recognized during his lifetime for his accomplishments of almost universal breadth. However, it is his literary works that have most consistently sustained his reputation, and that also serve to demonstrate most clearly his many-faceted relationship to music. . . .
“Culture: the cement that binds Europe together”
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-13-280_en.htm?locale=en