Advertised as ‘ A night of powerful music with today’s superstars,’ Arizona Opera’s concert of opera arias definitely lived up to those words.
Author: Gary Hoffman
Katya Kabanova, London
Anguished, lacerating, irredeemably tragic, David Alden’s new production of Katya Kabanova presents a drama of unalleviated suffering and unremitting bleakness.
Debussy’s PellÈas et MÈlisande
Five years after the premiËre of PellÈas et MÈlisande, Wilhelm
Worringer published the twentieth century’s first great treatise on
abstraction in art:
PlatÈe, OpÈra national du Rhin, Strasbourg
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/7f49c7f2-311f-11df-8e6f-00144feabdc0.html
A Midsummer Night’s Dream by ETO
A silvery tree stretched its gnarled branches across the moonlit stage, and from the briar and bush spiky, feathered fairies wriggled and crept, intent on mischief and malevolence.
The Nose, New York
When the orchestra re-tuned itself between the intermissionless acts of the Met premiere of The Nose last week, many in the audience were uncertain whether they were hearing practice or prelude.
Verdi’s Attila, New York
The curtain rises on an enormous pile of crumbling reinforced concrete,
broken wires sticking out every which way – an image that has replaced
(at least in the minds of set designers) the romantic columned or castellated
ruins that thrilled our ancestors, especially around the time, 1846, that Verdi
composed Attila.
Das Rheingold, Paris Opera (Bastille)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2747beac-2b9c-11df-a5c7-00144feabdc0.html