Superlatives to describe Lise Davidsen’s voice have been piling up
since she won Placido Domingo’s 2015 Operalia competition, blowing
everyone away. She has been called “a voice in a million” and
“the new Kirsten Flagstad.”
Month: May 2019
Lise Davidsen sings Wagner and Strauss
Nicky Spence and Julius Drake record The Diary of One Who Disappeared
From Hyperion comes a particularly fine account of Leoš Janáček’s song cycle The Diary of One Who Disappeared. Handsome-voiced Nicky Spence is the young peasant who loses his head over an alluring gypsy and is never seen again.
Time Stands Still: L’Arpeggiata at Wigmore Hall
Christina Pluhar would presumably irritate the Brexit Party: she delights in crossing borders and boundaries. Mediterraneo, the programme that she recorded and performed with L’Arpeggiata in 2013, journeyed through the ‘olive frontier’ – Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Spain, southern Italy – mixing the sultry folk melodies of Greece, Spain and Italy with the formal repetitions of Baroque instrumental structures, and added a dash of the shady timbres and rhythmic litheness of jazz.
Puccini’s Tosca at The Royal Opera House
Sitting through Tosca – and how we see and hear it these days – does sometimes make one feel one hasn’t been to the opera but to a boxing match. Joseph Kerman’s lurid, inspired or plain wrong-headed description of this opera as ‘a shabby little shocker’ was at least half right in this tenth revival of Jonathan Kent’s production.
A life-affirming Vixen at the Royal Academy of Music
‘It will be a dream, a fairy tale that will warm your heart’: so promised a preview article in MoravskÈ noviny designed to whet the appetite of the Brno public before the first performance of Leoö Jan·?ek’s The Cunning Little Vixen at the town’s Na hradb·ch Theatre on 6th November 1924.
Peter Sellars’ kinaesthetic vision of Lasso’s Lagrime di San Pietro
On 24th May 1594 just a few weeks before his death on 14 June, the elderly Orlando di Lasso signed the dedication of his Lagrime di San Pietro – an expansive cycle of seven-voice penitential madrigale spirituali, setting vernacular poetry on the theme of Peter’s threefold denial of Christ – to Pope Clement VIII.
Garsington Opera Announces 2020 season and 2019 Paris Performance
Garsington Opera is delighted to announce the 2020 season that will open on 28 May, featuring three new productions – Verdi’s Un giorno di regno, Mozart’s Mitridate, re di Ponto, Dvo?·k’s Rusalka and a revival of John Cox’s legendary production of Beethoven’s Fidelio.
Karlheinz Stockhausen: Donnerstag aus Licht
Stockhausen was one of the most visionary of composers, and no more so than in his Licht operas, but what you see can often get in the way of what you hear. I’ve often found fully staged productions of his operas a distraction to the major revelation in them – notably the sonorities he explores, of the blossoming, almost magical acoustical chrysalis, between voices and instruments.
David McVicar’s Andrea ChÈnier returns to Covent Garden
Is Umberto’s Giordano’s Andrea Chenier a verismo opera? Certainly, he is often grouped with Mascagni, Cilea, Leoncavallo and Puccini as a representative of this ‘school’. And, the composer described his 1876 opera as a dramma de ambiente storico.
Glyndebourne’s first production of Dialogues des CarmÈlites to open Glyndebourne Festival 2020
Glyndebourne’s first production of Poulenc’s Dialogues des CarmÈlites will open Glyndebourne Festival 2020, it was announced today. The opera house unveiled its 2020 plans at an event in its recently built Production Hub, hosted by Glyndebourne’s new senior leadership team, Artistic Director Stephen Langridge and Managing Director Sarah Hopwood, who jointly replace the former position of General Director.