With The Gondoliers of 1889, the main period of Arthur Sullivan’s
celebrated collaboration with W. S. Gilbert came to an end, and with it the
golden age of British operetta. Sullivan was accordingly at liberty to
compose more serious and emotional operas, as he had long desired, and
turned first to the moribund tradition of “Grand Opera” with Ivanhoe (1891).
Author: Gary Hoffman
A Landmark Revival of Sullivan’s Haddon Hall
Porgy and Bess in Seattle
When this production debuted last summer at Glimmerglass, my Opera Today colleague James Sohre found it a thoroughly
successful mounting of George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward’s noble but
problematic opera.
Saul, Glyndebourne Festival
Music reigned supreme at Glyndebourne’s production of Handel’s Saul, with warm lyricism and exquisite delicacy offered by its
soloists alongside an impressive powerhouse of a Chorus.
Glyndebourne announces new Artistic Director
http://www.operatoday.com/content/2018/08/glyndebourne_an.php
Prom 36: Webern, Mahler, and Wagner
One of the joys of writing regularly – sometimes, just sometimes, I think too regularly – about performance has been the transformation, both conscious and unconscious, of my scholarship.
Prom 33: Thea Musgrave, Phoenix Rising, and Johannes Brahms, Ein deutsches Requiem, op.45
I am not sure I could find much of a connection between the two works on offer here. They offered ‘contrast’ of a sort, I suppose, yet not in a meaningful way such as I could discern.
Prom 26: Dido and Cleopatra – Queens of Fascination
In this, her Proms debut, Anna Prohaska offered something akin to a cantata of two queens, complementary and contrasted: Dido and Cleopatra. Returning in a sense to her ‘early music’ roots – her career has always been far richer, more varied, but that world has always played an important part – she collaborated with the Italian ‘period’ ensemble, Il Giardino Armonico and Giovanni Antonini.
Thought-Provoking Concert in Honor of Bastille Day
Sopranos Elise Brancheau and Shannon Jones, along with pianists Martin
Néron and Keith Chambers, presented a thrilling evening of
French-themed music in an evening entitled: “Salut à la
France,” at the South Oxford Space in Brooklyn this past Saturday,
July 14th.
Madama Butterfly at the Princeton Festival
The Princeton Festival brings a run of three high-quality opera
performances to town each summer, alternating between a modern opera and a
traditional warhorse. John Adams’ Nixon in China has been
announced for next summer. So this year Princeton got Giacomo
Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, for which the Festival
assembled an impressive cast and delivered a polished performance.
Beyond Gilbert and Sullivan: Edward Loder’s Raymond and Agnes and the Apotheosis of English Romantic Opera
Mention ‘nineteenth-century English opera’ to most people, and
they will immediately think ‘Gilbert and Sullivan’. If they
really know their Gilbert and Sullivan, they’ll probably remember
that Sullivan always wanted to compose more serious operas, but that
Gilbert resisted this, believing they should ‘stick to their
last’: light, comic, tuneful satire.