San Francisco has fielded, masterfully, a giganticized miniaturized version of Gioachino Rossini’s iconic masterwork Il barbiere di Siviglia in a parking lot for hundreds of socially distanced cars. It is…
Author: Michael Milenski
The Twilight of Dreams in Palermo
Il crepuscolo dei sogni burst out of Palermo’s Teatro Massimo last Tuesday thanks to YouTube streaming. The link to the resulting video is below.
La Bohème at a Drive-in Movie Theater
Well, maybe it wasn’t an opera house, but it was somewhere to go for opera beyond your living room. It was festive indeed to join a few hundred diehard aficionados…
ROF Streams Rossini’s
La cambiale di matrimonio
The Rossini festival of Rossini’s hometown, Pesaro, streams the premiere of its new production of La cambiale di matrimonio, Rossini’s second opera on August 8 (and briefly “on demand” after).
Salzburg Elektra premiere to be streamed
Stage director Krzysztof Warlikowski offers a happy ending, he hints, to Richard Strauss’ monumental tragedy Elektra at the Salzburg Festival, streamed live at its premiere on August 1 from the…
The Two Summer Festivals That Can
Against all odds the festivals of Salzburg and Rossini’s Pesaro are forging ahead this summer with real, live opera, though the limited programs and scarcity of tickets may discourage us…
La PÈrichole in Marseille
The most notable of all PÈricholes of Offenbach’s sentimental operetta is surely the legendary Hortense Schneider who created the role back in 1868 at Paris’ ThÈ‚tre des VarietÈs. Alas there…
EugËne OnÈguine in Marseille
A splendid 1997 provincial production of Tchaikovsky’s take on Pushkin’s Bryonic hero found its way onto a major ProvenÁal stage just now. The historic OpÈra Municipal de Marseille possesses a…
Parsifal in Toulouse
AurÈlien Bory, director of a small, avant garde theater company in Toulouse, staged a spellbinding Parsifal at the ThÈ‚tre du Capitole, Toulouse’s famed Orchestre National du Capitole in the pit…
Aix Roars Back
After the propitious inauguration of Pierre Audi’s management of the Aix Festival in 2019 came the pandemic. The 2020 festival went up in Covid flames. The 2021 festival roars again…