In its ongoing celebration of Verdi’s centennial year, the Los Angeles Opera offered a new production of Falstaff, the composer’s last and most brilliant opera — brilliant in every scintillating, sparkling sense of the word.
Year: 2013
Weber’s Euryanthe, London
Poor Weber: opera companies, especially in England, do him anything but proud.
Early Opera Company: Acis and Galatea
Acis and Galatea was one of Handel’s most popular works, frequently revived in his life time and beyond.
Werner G¸ra Lieder recital, Wigmore Hall
German tenor Werner G¸ra, who has made a speciality of the German lieder repertoire, opened this recital at the Wigmore Hall with Beethoven’s An Die Ferne Geliebte, the composer’s only song cycle and the first significant example of the form.
Porgy and Bess in San Francisco
It’s been renamed “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” it hails itself as “The American Musical” and further qualifies itself as “The Porgy and Bess for the Twenty-First Century.”
Arizona Opera Presents a Fine Flying Dutchman
Richard Wagner wrote: “The voyage through the Norwegian reefs made a wonderful impression on my imagination; the legend of the Flying Dutchman, which the sailors verified, took on a distinctive, strange coloring that only my sea adventures could have given it.”
The Rape of Lucretia, Glyndebourne Touring Opera
‘If she is adulterous, why is she praised? If chaste, why was she put to death?’
Britten’s Atmospheric War Requiem, London
On Remembrance Sunday, Semyon Bychkov conducted Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem at the Royal Albert Hall with Roderick Williams, Allan Clayton, Sabrina Cvilak, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Chorus, Crouch End Festival Chorus and choristers of Westminster Abbey.
Barbican Britten
The mantle of tenor Peter Pears’ legacy hung heavily over his immediate ‘successors’, as they performed music that had been composed by Benjamin Britten for the man to whom he avowed, ‘I write every note with your heavenly voice in my head’.