The Wigmore Hall, London, has launched Schubert : The Complete Songs, a 40-concert series to run through the 2015 and 2016 seasons. There have been Schubert marathons before, like BBC Radio 3’s all-Schubert week and The Oxford Lieder Festival’s Schubert series last year, but the Wigmore Hall series will be a major landmark because the Wigmore Hall is the Wigmore Hall, the epitome of excellence.
Year: 2015
Honegger: Jeanne d’Arc au b˚cher
Marion Cotillard and Marc Soustrot bring the drama to the sweeping score of Arthur Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au
b˚cher, an adaptation of the Trial of Joan of Arc
Luisa Miller in San Francisco
Luisa Miller sits on the fringes of the repertory, and since its introduction into the modern repertory in the 1970’s it comes around every 15 or so years. Unfortunately this 2015 San Francisco occasion has not bothered to rethink this remarkable opera.
Salieri: La grotta di Trofonio (Trofonio’s Cave)
Demonised by Pushkin and Peter Shaffer, Antonio Salieri lives in the public
imagination as the embittered rival of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — whose genius
he lamented and revered in equal measure, and against whom he schemed and
plotted at the Emperor Joseph II’s Viennese court.
Chicago Lyric’s Stars Shine at Millennium Park
The annual concert given by Lyric Opera of Chicago as an outdoor event previewing the forthcoming season took place on 11 September 2015 at Millennium Park.
Far in the Heavens — Choral Music of Stephen Paulus
Stephen Paulus provided the musical world, and particularly the choral world, with music both provocative and pleasing through a combination of lyricism and a modern-Romantic tonal palette.
Gluck: Orphée et Eurydice
Orpheus — that Greek hero whose songs could enchant both deities and beasts, whose lyre has become a metaphor for the power of music itself, and whose journey to the Underworld to rescue his wife, Eurydice, kick-started the art of opera in Mantua in 1607 — has been travelling far and wide around the UK in 2015.
Vaughan Williams and Holst Double Bill
One is a quasi-verbatim rendering of J.M. Synge’s bleak tale of a Donegal
family’s fateful dependency on and submission to the deathly power of the
sea.
Iestyn Davies at Wigmore Hall
Is there anything that countertenor Iestyn Davies cannot do with his voice?
For Odyssey Opera, No Operatic Challenge is Too Great
For a company founded in 2013, Odyssey Opera has an astounding track record. To take on Korngold’s Die tote Stadt is ambitious enough, but to do so within only a year of the company’s founding seems almost single-minded.