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…
Author: Michael Milenski
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…
Parsifal in Palermo
Richard Wagner chose to finish his Good Friday opera while residing in Sicily’s Palermo, partaking of the natural splendors of its famed verdant basin, the Conca d’Oro, and reveling in…
I Capuleti e i Montecchi in Rome
Shakespearean sentiments may gracefully enrich Gounod’s Romeo et Juliet, but powerful Baroque tensions enthrall us in the bel canto complexities of Vincenzo Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi. Conductor Daniele…
Tristan und Isolde in Bologna
East German stage director Ralf Pleger promised us a Tristan unlike anything we had ever seen. It was indeed. And Slovakian conductor Jura Val?uha gave us a Tristan as never…
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).