Expectations were high in Pesaro just now, not for the new production of Bianca e Falliero by French stage director Jean-Louis Grinda (expectations were low), but of the Rossini Opera…
Author: Michael Milenski
Ermione at the Rossini Opera Festival
Ermione (Hermione in the Greek myth, though Rossini’s opera has nothing to do with the myth or Euripides tragedy) was anticipated with great expectations both because Michele Mariotti, Pesaro’s conducting…
L’equivoco stravagante at the Rossini Opera Festival
L’equivoco stravagante (1811) had only three performances before it was pulled by the censors. This is the same year its 19 year old composer was hauled off to prison for…
The Gambler (Игрокъ) and The Idiot (Идиот) at Salzburg’s Rock Riding School
The Salzburg Festival’s Felsenreitschule is home to most of its productions of twentieth century opera, just now two Russian operas based on novels by Fyodor Dostoevsky — Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s The…
Tristan und Isolde in Bayreuth
It is a Tristan well worthy of the Wagner shrine (not all Bayreuth productions are). Icelandic theater director Thorleifur Örn Arnarsson imposed a truly hermetic discussion of love onto the…
Der Fliegende Holländer in Bayreuth
Like all productions by Russian revisionist stage director Dimitri Tcherniakov, the Bayreuth 2021 Dutchman production is fraught with meaning, delving deeply into the contemporary resonances he discovers in nineteenth century…
Il ritorno d’Ulisse at the Aix Festival
Pierre Audi, the artistic director of the Aix Festival, completed the Aix Festival’s Monteverdi cycle just now by staging, himself, this Il ritorno d’Ulisse (1640). L’Orfeo (1607) was staged by…
FIFOE 2024 in Entrecasteaux
The Festival International de Film d’Opéra à Entrecasteaux (a tiny village in Provence not far from the A8 autoroute connecting Nice and Marseille). The second edition of this unique summer…
Samson at the Aix Festival
Rameau’s Samson, with the libretto by François-Marie Arouet aka Voltaire, or rather a sort of Rameau/Voltaire Samson imagined by French early music conductor Raphaél Pichon and German stage director Otto Guth,…
Songs and Fragments at the Aix Festival
That’s Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) by Peter Maxwell Davies and Kafka-Fragmente (1987) by György Kurtág, an inspired pairing by Pierre Audi, the artistic director of the Aix…