Year: 2013

Take a pair of peripatetic, sharp witted, libidinous dramatists with deeply
humanist hearts, add a brilliant, fun loving young composer, who believed in
forgiveness, and you end up with The Marriage of Figaro, a comic,
always relevant opera, which the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra presented
in Disney Hall, as part of its Mozart/DaPonte series.

Since receiving some fairly mixed reviews of their production of Mozart’s
Zaide at the 2010 Buxton Festival, Ian Page’s Classical
Opera seem to have focused their attention on recordings and themed
concert performances of 18^th-century riches and rarities,

In May of 2013, the Spire Series at the First Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, Maryland, observed the fiftieth anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy by presenting a work dealing with the 1963 assassination.

Dulce Rosa, a brand new opera, had its world premiere Friday night, May 17, 2013 at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, California. It was produced by Los Angeles Opera, but staged in the smaller theater.

Richard Jones’ 2009 production of Verdi’s Falstaff translates the action from the first Elizabethan age to the start of the second.

Baritone Gareth John is rapidly accumulating a war-chest of honours. Winner of the 2013 Kathleen Ferrier Award, he recently won the Royal Academy of Music Patrons’ Award and was presented the Silver Medal by the Worshipful Company of Musicians.

This second revival of Jonathan Miller’s La bohËme was the first time I had caught the production.

It’s Verdi’s bicentenary year and Rolando VillazÛn has two new CDs to plug — titled somewhat confusingly, ‘VillazÛn: Verdi’ and ‘VillazÛn’s Verdi’, the latter a ‘personal selection’ of favourite numbers performed by stars of the past and present.