Not the 14th century Chinese play nor its 1832 French translation, but a 1931 operatic re-creation by Alexander Zemlinsky of a 1925 German translation by “Klabund,” staged just now in Lyon by French stage director Richard Brunel.
Year: 2018
Jonathan Miller’s “Così” strikes gold again
When did “concept” become a dirty word? In the world of opera, the rot set in innocently, gradually.
Tucson Desert Song Festival Presents Artists from the Met and Arizona Opera
The Tucson Desert Song Festival consists of three weekends of vocal music in orchestral, chamber, choral, and solo formats along with related lectures and master classes.
BartÛk’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle at the Barbican
Two great operas come from the year 1911 – Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier and Bela BartÛk’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. Both are masterpieces, but they are very different kinds of operas and experienced quite asymmetric performance histories.
Puccini’s Tosca at the Royal Opera House
Now on its ninth revival, Jonathan Kent’s classic Tosca for Covent Garden is a study in art, beauty and passion but also darkness, power and empire. Part of the production’s lasting greatness, and contemporary value, is that it looks inwards towards the malignancy of a great empire (in this case a Napoleonic one), whilst looking outward towards a city-nation in terminal decline (Rome).
ROH Announces 2018 Jette Parker Young Artists
The Royal Opera House has announced the five singers who will join the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme in September, selected from more than 440 applicants from 59 countries.
The Epic of Gilgamesh – Bohuslav Martin?
New recording of the English version of Bohuslav Martin?’s The Epic of Gilgamesh, from Supraphon, the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Manfred Honeck. This is the world premiere recording of the text in English, the original language in which it was written.
Maybe the Best L’heure espagnole Yet
The new recording, from Munich, has features in common with one from Stuttgart that I greatly enjoyed and reviewed here: the singers are all native French-speakers, the orchestra is associated with a German radio channel, we are hearing an actual performance (or in this case an edited version from several performances, in April 2016), and the recording is released by the orchestra itself or its institutional parent.
Stéphanie d’Oustrac in Two Exotic Masterpieces by Maurice Ravel
The two works on this CD make an apt and welcome pair. First we have Ravel’s sumptuous three-song cycle about the mysteries of love and fantasies of exotic lands. Then we have his one-act opera that takes place in a land that, to French people at the time, was beckoningly exotic, and whose title might be freely translated “The Nutty and Delightful Things That Can Happen in Spain in Just One Hour”.
The Schumanns at home: Temple Song 2018
Following their marriage, on 12th September 1840, Robert and Clara Schumann made their home in a first-floor apartment on the piano nobile of a classical-style residence now known as the Schumann House, on Inselstrafle, just a short walk from the centre of Leipzig.