‘The plot is perhaps the least moral in all opera; wrong triumphs in the name of love and we are not expected to mind.’
Month: May 2016
Madame Butterfly , ENO
Anthony Minghella’s production of Madame Butterfly for ENO is
wearing well. First seen in 2005, it is now being aired for the sixth time and is still, as I observed in 2013, ‘a breath-taking visual banquet’.
Valiant but tentative: La straniera at the Concertgebouw
This concert version of La straniera felt like a compulsory musicology field trip, but it had enough vocal flashes to lobby for more frequent performances of this midway Bellini.
London Festival of Baroque Music 2016: Words with Purcell
As poetry is the harmony of words, so music is that of notes; and as poetry is a rise above prose and oratory, so is music the exaltation of poetry.
The Dark Mirror: Zender’s Winterreise
From experiments with musique concrète in the 1940s, to the
Minimalists’ explorations into tape-loop effects in the 1960s, via the
appearance of hip-hop in the 1970s and its subsequent influence on electronic
dance music in the 1980s, to digital production methods today,
‘sampling’ techniques have been employed by musicians working in
genres as diverse as jazz fusion, psychedelic rock and classical music.
Great Scott Wows San Diego
On May 7, 2016, San Diego Opera presented the West Coast premiere of Great Scott, an opera by Terrence McNally and Jake Heggie. McNally’s original libretto pokes fun at everything from football to bel canto period opera. It includes snippets of nineteenth century tunes as well as Heggie’s own bel canto writing.
Bellini’s Adelson e Salvini, London
A foiled abduction, a castle-threatening inferno, romantic infatuation, guilt-laden near-suicide, gun-shots and knife-blows: Andrea Leone Tottola’s libretto for Vincenzo Bellini’s first opera, Adelson e Salvini, certainly does not lack dramatic incident.
Manitoba Opera: Of Mice and Men
Opera as an art form has never shied away from the grittier shadows of life. Nor has Manitoba Opera, with its recent past productions dealing with torture, incest, murder and desperate political prisoners still so tragically relevant today.
Opera Las Vegas Announces Full Production of Carmen
Tickets on Sale NOW for June 10 & 12 Performances at UNLV’s Performing Arts Center Box Office
An interview with Tobias Ringborg
I arrive at the Jerwood Space, where rehearsals are underway for Garsington
Opera’s forthcoming production of Idomeneo, to find that the
afternoon rehearsal has finished a little early.