There’s a long tradition of bringing productions from Glyndebourne to the BBC Proms in London. It’s one way of making them more widely accessible. The original production of Bizet’s Carmen…
Month: August 2024
PROM 50: A curate’s egg of an evening but a magnificent Glagolitic Mass
For the second of two consecutive appearances at the Albert Hall, Jakub Hrůša and his Prague-based orchestra delivered an all-Czech programme showcasing a Proms premiere, a seldom-heard piano concerto and…
PROM 45: Jamie Barton sings Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder
In the great pantheon of German Romanticism there is a natural association of certain poets with certain composers: Heine and Schumann or Mörike and Wolf, for instance. Friedrich Rückert is…
Il barbiere di Siviglia at the Rossini Opera Festival
The city of Pesaro is the 2024 Capitale Italiana della Cultura, adding luster to its 2017 Unesco designation as a Città Creativa. All this calls for celebration, and that was…
Bianca e Falliero at the Rossini Opera Festival
Expectations were high in Pesaro just now, not for the new production of Bianca e Falliero by French stage director Jean-Louis Grinda (expectations were low), but of the Rossini Opera…
Ermione at the Rossini Opera Festival
Ermione (Hermione in the Greek myth, though Rossini’s opera has nothing to do with the myth or Euripides tragedy) was anticipated with great expectations both because Michele Mariotti, Pesaro’s conducting…
L’equivoco stravagante at the Rossini Opera Festival
L’equivoco stravagante (1811) had only three performances before it was pulled by the censors. This is the same year its 19 year old composer was hauled off to prison for…
PROM 37: Pappano’s operatic War Requiem resonates with poetry and horror
Composers have long taken the horrors of the Second World War and used it as either a lament for its atrocities or an expression of reconciliation after them. Both Krzysztof…
The Puccini Festival at Torre del Lago springs a surprise in the composer’s final opera with its homage to the premiere’s abrupt conclusion
2024 is the centenary anniversary of Puccini’s death, and so it makes sense that the prominent festival of the composer’s operas at Torre del Lago (the Tuscan lakeside resort where…
The Gambler (Игрокъ) and The Idiot (Идиот) at Salzburg’s Rock Riding School
The Salzburg Festival’s Felsenreitschule is home to most of its productions of twentieth century opera, just now two Russian operas based on novels by Fyodor Dostoevsky — Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s The…