For his farewell production as director of opera at the Royal Opera House, Kasper Holten has chosen Wagner’s only ‘comedy’, Die Meistersinger von N¸rnberg: an opera about the very medium in which it is written.
Year: 2017
AZ Musicfest Presents Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci
The dramatic strength that Stage Director Michael Scarola drew from his Pagliacci cast was absolutely amazing. He gave us a sizzling rendition of the libretto, pointing out every bit of foreshadowing built into the plot.
English Touring Opera Spring 2017: a lesson in Patience
A skewering of the preening pretentiousness of the Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes of the late-nineteenth century, Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1881 operetta Patience outlives the fashion that fashioned it, and makes mincemeat of mincing dandies and divas, of whatever period, who value style over substance, art over life.
Tara Erraught: mezzo and clarinet in partnership at the Wigmore Hall
Irish mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught demonstrated a relaxed, easy manner and obvious enjoyment of both the music itself and its communication to the audience during this varied Rosenblatt Series concert at the Wigmore Hall. Erraught and her musical partners for the evening – clarinettist Ulrich Pluta and pianist James Baillieu – were equally adept at capturing both the fresh lyricism of the exchanges between voice and clarinet in the concert arias of the first half of the programme and clinching precise dramatic moods and moments in the operatic arias that followed the interval.
Opera Across the Waves
This Sunday the Metropolitan Opera will feature as part of the BBC Radio 3 documentary, Opera Across the Waves, in which critic and academic Flora Willson explores how opera is engaging new audiences. The 45-minute programme explores the roots of global opera broadcasting and how in particular, New York’s Metropolitan Opera became one of the most iconic and powerful
producers of opera.
Berliner Philharmoniker’s Ruhr Residency (I): Camilla Tilling charms in the Childhood delights of Mahler’s Fourth
Before, I arrived in Essen for Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, I made a pitstop in Dortmund. The night before, the opera took place here, and now a packed Konzerthaus flocked to hear Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. American soprano Camilla Tilling starred in the solo part. Before the intermission, Patricia Kopatchinskaja enthralled the audience with Ligeti’s Violin Concerto. Mahler’s celebration of life proved the perfect antidote to Ligeti’s fearless exploration of the terror in humanity.
Premiere: Riders of the Purple Sage
On February 25, 2017, in Tucson and on the following March 3 in Phoenix, Arizona Opera presented its first world premiere, Craig Bohmler and Steven Mark Kohn’s Riders of the Purple Sage.
English Touring Opera Spring 2017: a disappointing Tosca
During the past few seasons, English Touring Opera has confirmed its triple-value: it takes opera to the parts of the UK that other companies frequently fail to reach; its inventive, often theme-based, programming and willingness to take risks shine a light on unfamiliar repertory which invariably offers unanticipated pleasures; the company provides a platform for young British singers who are easing their way into the ‘industry’, assuming a role that latterly ENO might have been expected to fulfil.
A Winter’s Tale: a world premiere at English National Opera
The first production of Ryan Wigglesworth’s first opera, based upon Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, is clearly a major event in English National Opera’s somewhat trimmed-down season. Wigglesworth, who serves also as conductor and librettist, professes to have been obsessed with the play for more than twenty years, and one can see why The Winter’s Tale, with its theatrical ‘set-pieces’ – the oracle scene, the tempest, the miracle of a moving statue – and its grandiose emotions, dominated as the play is by Leontes’ obsessively articulated, over-intellectualized jealousy, would invite operatic adaptation.
Wexford Festival Opera announces details of 2017 Festival
Today, Wexford Festival Opera announced the programme and principal casting details for the forthcoming 2017 festival. Now in its 66th year, this internationally renowned festival will run over an extended 18-day period, from Thursday, 19 October to Sunday, 5 November.