Halévy’s La reine de Chypre (The Queen of Cyprus) is the 17th opera to be released in the impressively prolific “French Opera” series of recordings produced by the Center for French Romantic Music, a scholarly organization located at the Palazzetto Bru Zane in Venice. (Other recent offerings have included Saint-Saëns’s richly characterized Proserpine, Benjamin Godard’s fascinating Dante–which contains scenes set in Heaven and Hell–and Hérold’s Le pré aux clercs, an opéra-comique that had a particularly long life in the international operatic repertoire.)
Author: Gary Hoffman
The real Traviata. The Song of Marie Duplessis
https://h-france.net/vol18reviews/vol18no52palidda.pdf
Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Opera to Present Caccini’s Alcina
The GRAMMY-Winning Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Opera Series
presents Francesca Caccini’s Alcina on Thanksgiving weekend
– November 24 & 25 in Boston and November 26 & 27 in New York
City
Dutch touring Tosca is an edge-of-your-seat thriller
Who needs another Tosca? Seasoned opera buffs can be blasé about repertoire mainstays. But the Nederlandse Reisopera’s production currently touring the Netherlands is worth seeing, whether it is your first or your hundred-and-first acquaintance with Puccini’s political drama. The staging is refreshing and pacey. Musically, it has the four crucial ingredients: three accomplished leads and a conductor who swashbuckles through the score in a blaze of color.
Two falls out of three for Britten in Seattle Screw
The miasma of doom that pervades the air of the great house of Bly seems to seep slowly into the auditorium, dulling the senses, weighing down the mind. What evil lurks here? Can these people be saved? Do we care?
Fine performances in uneven War Requiem at the Concertgebouw
At the very least, that vehement, pacifist indictment against militarism, Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, should leave the audience shaking a little. This performance by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra only partially succeeded in doing so. The cast credits raised the highest expectations, but Gianandrea Noseda, stepping in for an ailing Mariss Jansons and conducting the RCO for the first time, did not bring out the full potential at his disposal.
The Tallis Scholars at Cadogan Hall
In their typical non-emphatic way, the Tallis Scholars under Peter Phillips
presented here a selection of English sacred music from the Eton Choirbook
to Tallis. There was little to ruffle anyone’s feathers here, little
in the way of overt ‘interpretation’ – certainly in a
modern sense – but ample opportunity to appreciate the mastery on
offer in this music, its remoteness from many of our present concerns, and
some fine singing.
Superlative Lohengrin from Bayreuth, 1967
The names of Belfast-born soprano Heather Harper and Kansas-born tenor James King may not resonate for younger music lovers, but they sure do for folks my age. Harper was the glowing, nimble soprano in Colin Davis’s renowned 1966 recording of Handel’s Messiah and in Davis’s top-flight recording (ca. 1978) of Britten’s Peter Grimes, featuring Jon Vickers.
Young audience embraces Die Zauberflöte at Dutch National Opera
The Dutch National Opera season opens officially on the 7th of September with a third run of Simon McBurney’s production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, an unqualified success at its 2012 premiere. Last Tuesday, however, an audience aged between sixteen and thirty-five got to see a preview of this co-production with English National Opera and the Aix-en-Provence Festival.
Kings College, Cambridge launches as curator on Apple Music
November 5, 2018, Los Angeles, CA: Today, King’s College Cambridge announces the launch of the College as a curator on Apple Music.