On November 12, 2017, Arizona Opera presented Giacomo Puccini’s verismo opera, Tosca, in a dramatic production directed by Tara Faircloth. Her production utilized realistic scenery from Seattle Opera and detailed costumes from the New York City Opera. Gregory Allen Hirsch’s lighting made the set look like the church of St. Andrea as some of us may have remembered it from time gone by.
Year: 2017
The Lighthouse: Shadwell Opera at Hackney Showroom
‘Only make the reader’s general vision of evil intense enough … and his own experience, his own imagination, his own sympathy … and horror … will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.’
Julian PrÈgardien : Schubert, Wigmore Hall, London
The Wigmore Hall’s complete Schubert song series continued with Julian PrÈgardien and Christoph Schnackertz, in a recital deferring from May. Well worth the wait, because PrÈgardian is good, his singing enhanced by very strong musical instincts. In Lieder, sensitivity and musical intelligence are as important as voice. A good recital, is one where you come away feeling you’ve gone deeper into the repertoire thanks to the performer, as opposed to watching celebrity for celebrity sake
Elisabeth Kulman sings Mahler’s R¸ckert-Lieder with Sir Mark Elder and the Britten Sinfonia
Austrian singer Elisabeth Kulman has had an interesting career trajectory. She began her singing life as a soprano but later shifted to mezzo-soprano/contralto territory. Esteemed on the operatic stage, she relinquished the theatre for the concert platform in 2015, following an accident while rehearsing Tristan.
Tremendous revival of Katie Mitchell’s Lucia at the ROH
The morning sickness, miscarriage and maundering wraiths are still present, but Katie Mitchell’s Lucia di Lammermoor, receiving its first revival at the ROH, seems less ‘hysterical’ this time round – and all the more harrowing for it.
Manon in San Francisco
Nothing but a wall and a floor (and an enormous battery of unseen lighting instruments) and two perfectly matched artists, the Manon of soprano Ellie Dehn and the des Grieux of tenor Michael Fabiano, the centerpiece of Paris’ operatic Belle …poque found vibrant presence on the War Memorial stage.
Garsington Opera’s Silver Birch on BBC Arts Digital
Audiences will have the chance to feel part of a new opera inspired by Siegfried Sassoon’s poems with an innovative 360-degree simulated experience of Garsington Opera’s Silver Birch on BBC Arts Digital from midday, Wednesday 8th November.
Mozart’s Requiem: Pierre-Henri Dutron Edition
The stories surrounding Mozart’s Requiem are well-known.
Dominated by the work in the final days of his life, Mozart claimed that he
composed the Requiem for himself (Landon, 153), rather than for the wealthy
Count Walsegg’s wife, the man who had commissioned it in July 1791.
A beguiling Il barbiere di Siviglia from GTO
I had mixed feelings about Annabel Arden’s production of Il barbiere di Siviglia when it was first seen at Glyndebourne in 2016. Now reprised (revival director, SinÈad O’Neill) for the autumn 2017 tour, the designs remain a vibrant mosaic of rich hues and Moorish motifs, the supernumeraries – commedia stereotypes cum comic interlopers – infiltrate and interact even more piquantly, and the harpsichords are still flying in, unfathomably, from all angles. But, the drama is a little less hyperactive, the characterisation less larger-than-life. And, this Saturday evening performance went down a treat with the Canterbury crowd on the final night of GTO’s brief residency at the Marlowe Theatre.
Brett Dean’s Hamlet: GTO in Canterbury
‘There is no such thing as Hamlet,’ says Matthew Jocelyn in an interview printed in the 2017 Glyndebourne programme book. The librettist of Australian composer Brett Dean’s opera based on the Bard’s most oft-performed tragedy, which was premiered to acclaim in June this year, was noting the variants between the extant sources for the play – the First, or ‘Bad’, Quarto of 1603, which contains just over half of the text of the Second Quarto which published the following year, and the First Folio of 1623 – no one of which can reliably be guaranteed superiority over the other.