To some people, Simon Boccanegra (1857, rev. 1881) is one of Verdi’s finest musical masterpieces, yet both admirers and detractors regard it as based on one of his most problematic…
Month: November 2023
Bampton Classical Opera Young Singers’ Competition – winners announced
Bampton Classical Opera is delighted to announce that the winner of the 2023 Young Singers’ Competition is mezzo-soprano Melissa Gregory. The second prize has been awarded to countertenor Kieron-Connor Valentine. The winner of the accompanists’…
A dystopian Ariodante at the Royal Academy of Music
‘The Rules’ define a male-centric world as oppressive and restrictive as Margaret Atwood’s Gilead. Kings rule by divine right. Gender is binary. The value of a woman is her purity.…
Welsh National Opera: Ainadamar at the Mayflower, Southampton
Spain is ‘a country of death, a country open to death’ once declared the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. It’s an assertion that provides a foretaste of Ainadamar, Osvaldo…
Médée at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden
Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s lyric tragedy Médée premiered in 1694 with its dedicatee, Louis XIV, in attendance. The five-act libretto adapted by Thomas Corneille from Euripides’ play retells one of the most…
L’amore dei tre re at La Scala, Milan
Following its 1913 world premiere at the Teatro alla Scala, Italo Montemezzi’s L’amore dei tre re (The Love of Three Kings) immediately entered the standard repertory both in Italy and…
Salome at the Staatsoper Hamburg
The recent production of Richard Strauss’s Salome at the Staatsoper Hamburg, one of Germany’s major companies, has received rapturous reviews. Its main virtue is the assumption of the title role…
The Elixir of Love in San Francisco
That’s L’elisir d’amore, Donizetti’s bel canto gem, dolled up somewhere on the Italian riviera by the same team that set San Francisco Opera’s 2012 Lohengrin in a Soviet era, bookless…
Anthony Roth Costanzo makes his debut at Wigmore Hall with La Nuova Musica
On the page this looked rather a rag-bag sort of programme. Some early Mozart opera seria arias and songs, alongside two of Gluck’s best-known arias from Orfeo ed Euridice, welded…
Forget This Night: a new disc by Katharine Dain and Sam Armstrong
Lili Boulanger’s life and composing career were tragically all too brief. Born in 1893, into an eminent musical family, she was both a prodigy and a pioneer, becoming the first…