Pierre Audi’s 2021 Aix Festival included two small pieces that continue the Festival’s operatic exploration of the larger Mediterranean world, meanwhile connecting the Festival’s general director to his Lebanese roots.…
Author: Michael Milenski
Le nozze di Figaro at the Aix Festival
Mozart meets hysteria in this new staging of his masterpiece by Dutch metteur en scène Lotte de Beer, to the quick and just baton of conductor Thomas Hengelbrock and his Balthaser…
Innocence at the Aix Festival
This was the world premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s new opera that will come soon to Helsinki, Amsterdam, London, New New York and San Francisco, its co-commissioners. Finland born composer Saariaho…
Tristan und Isolde at the Aix Festival
Soprano Nina Stemme, tenor Stuart Skelton, bass Franz-Josef Selig and conductor Simon Rattle create a Tristan of transcendent music in a revelatory staging by Simon Stone. The London Symphony Orchestra…
Falstaff at the Aix Festival
It was inevitable. If stage director Barrie Kosky famously ravaged Wagner’s only comedy at Bayreuth, then he must do the same to Verdi’s only comedy. It happened just now in…
The Barber of Seville by San Francisco Opera
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…
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).
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…