Best of the season so far! William Christie and Les Arts Florissants performed Rameau Grand Motets at late night Prom 17.
Year: 2014
Adriana Lecouvreur, Opera Holland Park
Twelve years after Opera Holland Park’s first production of Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, the opera made a welcome return.
Back to the Beginnings: Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria at Iford Opera.
The Italianate cloister setting at Iford chimes neatly with Monteverdi’s penultimate opera The Return of Ulysses, as the setting cannot but bring to mind those early days of the musical genre.
Schoenberg : Moses und Aron, Welsh National Opera, London
Once again, we find ourselves thanking an unrepresentable being for Welsh National Opera’s commitment to its mission.
Count Ory, Dead Man Walking
and La traviata in Des Moines
If you don’t have the means to get to the Rossini festival in Pesaro, you would do just as well to come to Indianola, Iowa, where Des Moines Metro Opera festival has devised a heady production of Le Comte Ory that is as long on belly laughs as it is on musical fireworks.
Jan·?ek’s Glagolitic Mass, BBC Proms
Composed during just a few weeks of the summer of 1926, Jan·?ek’s Slavonic-text Glagolitic Mass was first performed in Brno in December 1927.
Donizetti and Mozart, Jette Parker Young Artists Royal Opera House, London
With the conclusion of the ROH 2013-14 season on Saturday evening – John Copley’s 40-year old production of La BohËme bringing down the summer curtain – the sun pouring through the gleaming windows of the Floral Hall was a welcome invitation to enjoy a final treat. The Jette Parker Young Artists Summer Showcase offered singers whom we have admired in minor and supporting roles during the past year the opportunity to step into the spotlight.
Glyndebourne’s Strauss Der Rosenkavalier, BBC Proms
Many words have already been spent – not all of them on musical matters – on Richard Jones’s Glyndebourne production of Der Rosenkavalier, which last night was transported to the Royal Albert Hall. This was the first time at the Proms that Richard Strauss’s most popular opera had been heard in its entirety and, despite losing two of its principals in transit from Sussex to SW1, this semi-staged performance offered little to fault and much to admire.
Il turco in Italia at the Aix Festival
Twenty years ago stage director Christopher Alden introduced Rossini’s then forgotten comedy to Southern California audiences in a production that is still remembered. In Aix Alden has revisited this complex work that many critics now consider Rossini’s greatest comedy.
First Night of the BBC Proms : Elgar The Kingdom
The BBC Proms 2014 season began with Sir Edward Elgars The Kingdom (1903-6). It was a good start to the season,which commemorates the start of the First World War. From that perspective Sir Andrew Davis’s The Kingdom moved me deeply.