‘When two men like us set out to produce a “trifle”, it has to become a very serious trifle’, wrote Hofmannsthal to Strauss during the gestation of their opera about opera.
Month: June 2014
Leoö Jan·?ek : The Cunning Little Vixen, Garsington Opera at Wormsley
Jan·?ek started The Cunning Little Vixen on the cusp of old age in 1922 and there is something deeply elegiac about it.
La Traviata in Marseille
It took only a couple of years for Il trovatore and Rigoletto to make it from Italy to the OpÈra de Marseille, but it took La traviata (Venice, 1853) sixteen years (Marseille, 1869).
Madama Butterfly in San Francisco
Gesamtkunstwerk, synthesis of fable, sound, shape and color in art, may have been made famous by Richard Wagner, and perhaps never more perfectly realized than just now by San Francisco Opera.
Luca Francesconi : Quartett, Linbury Studio Theatre, London
Luca Francesconi is well-respected in the avant garde. His music has been championed by the Arditti Quartett and features regularly in new music festivals. His opera Quartett has at last reached London after well-received performances in Milan and Amsterdam.
Puccini Manon Lescaut, Royal Opera House, London
Manon Lescaut at the Royal Opera House, London, brings out the humanity which lies beneath Puccini’s music. The composer was drawn to what we’d now called “outsiders. In Manon Lescaut, Puccini describes his anti-heroine with unsentimental honesty. His lush harmonies describe the way she abandons herself to luxury, but he doesn’t lose sight of the moral toughness at the heart of AbbÈ PrÈvost’s story, Manon is sensual but, like her brother, fatally obssessed with material things. Only when she has lost everything else does she find true values through love..