What better way for the long-reigning director of the Vienna State Opera, Ioan Holender, to celebrate the end of his time in the post than with a lengthy gala featuring such stars as Gergely NÈmeti, Roxana Constantinescu, Krassimira Stoyanova, and Keith Ikaia-Purdy?
Author: James Sohre
Beecham conducts Delius
Frederick Delius counts among those many composers whose reputations rely on their orchestral efforts, but who dearly wanted to make a lasting contribution to the opera repertory.
Willy Decker’s staging of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron
As a rule the celebrated incomplete operas of the repertory eluded completion due to the untimely death of the composer.
L’Amour des trois oranges on CD and DVD
Opera companies around the world — though relatively few in the United States — cannot resist the temptation to stage Sergei Prokofiev’s first major opera.
Macbeth from Paris and Parma
Superstitions surround theatrical productions of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy.
Carlos Kleiber — Traces to Nowhere
Film biographies of great musicians notoriously exhibit a preference for talking heads nattering on over any music passages.
Nino Machaidze: Romantic Arias
The back cover of soprano Nino Machiadze’s debut solo recital from Sony Classical quotes her as describing the disc’s selection of arias as “my world, my successes to date and my hopes for the future.”
Two one-act comic operas from New York Festival of Song
The New York Festival of Song, created and run by Steven Blier and Michael Barrett, dedicates itself to what one might call “American lieder” — art songs by top American composers, classic Broadway, and operatic numbers.
Donizetti’s Marino Faliero at the 2008 Bergamo Music Festival
Gaetano Donizetti is arguably the established opera composer with the highest ratio of failures to successes.
Previn and Caird’s Brief Encounter
The chief classical music and opera critic for the Los Angeles Times often criticizes any new operas based on familiar films or classic novels, on the basis of artistic timidity and conservatism.