Stage director Dimitri Tcherniakov sets Handel’s most performed opera in an air raid shelter (where else these days?), wittily deploying a direct hit on the shelter to announce Cleopatra’s scorching…
Author: Michael Milenski
One Morning Turns into an Eternity in Salzburg
A concoction imagined by American stage director Peter Sellars and Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. It is three orchestral masterpieces, fused, that host an abstract theater action — a body bag…
Das Rheingold and Die Walküre in Bayreuth
The first two of this fourth edition of the 2022 Bayreuth Ring des Nibelungen, staged by Valentin Schwarz, with the understanding that the Bayreuth Festival mounts a new Ring every…
A new Meistersinger in Bayreuth
Following the one with the gigantic blow-up of Beckmesser as a caricatured evil Jew. Zeitgeist has now made Beckmesser a populist rockstar, (lead photo, Michael Nagy as Beckmesser). The problem…
The Nine Jewelled Deer in Aix
Or was it ten? One lost count. But that was early in the evening of the telling of this sort of parable with accompanying instrumental improvisation by six earnest musicians. …
La Calisto in Aix
Dutch stage director Jetske Mijnssen transferred Francesco Cavalli’s whimsical 1651 comedy La Calisto from its native Venice to France, one hundred years later — 1751, where the arts of an…
Louise in Aix
Most of us know “Depuis le jour” from Louise, but few of us know Gustave Carpentier’s opera Louise. The Aix Festival has just now reintroduced the opera in a production…
The Story of Billy Budd, Sailor in Aix
“After Benjamin Britten,” the title continues. Thus a twentieth century masterpiece was reduced to its twenty-first century essentials — six singers, three keyboards, percussion, a platform and a sail. The…
Don Giovanni in Aix
The late, justly mourned Pierre Audi, general director of the Aix Festival for these last seven festivals, matched renowned conductors and stage directors to create monumental stagings of the gamut…
Mozart’s La scuola degli amanti in Lyon
Ossia Cosi fan tutti, as you never could have possibly imagined it. French stage director Marie-Éve Signeyrole flipped the opera’s two titles, setting the second of the Mozart / DaPonte…