Franco Zeffirelli, one of the world’s best-known opera directors, yesterday branded the inaugural season of the newly refurbished La Scala opera house a disgrace.
Zeffirelli accused the opera house of inviting second-rate conductors to perform. Writing to a journalist on the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, who had written approvingly of the programme, he said the situation “risks becoming utterly absurd and developing into a scandal of truly international proportions because La Scala belongs to the whole world”.
Category: News
Zeffirelli Has A Conniption
A Dead-end at Abbey Road?
Twilight of the CD Gods? A Studio ‘Tristan’ May Be the Last Ever By MICHAEL WHITE LONDON, Jan. 4 – The EMI recording studios at Abbey Road in north London…
Classical Music Sales Looking Up
A Year When Classical Labels Came Through By ANTHONY TOMMASINI In 2003, the problems affecting the classical recording business seemed daunting: markets flooded with multiple versions of the standard repertory;…
La Serva Padrona in Boston
Soprano Amanda Forsythe has sung so often with baritone David Kravitz that she was only mildly surprised recently when she Googled her name, and up popped a reference to “Amanda Kravitz.”
Tonight and tomorrow afternoon, Forsythe is paired with Kravitz again for Pergolesi’s delicious little opera “La Serva Padrona” (“The Maid as Mistress”), presented by Boston Baroque as part of its annual New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day gala at Sanders Theatre.
Tsar’s Bride at the Mariinsky
ST. PETERSBURG, December 29 (RIA Novosti) – The city’s Mariinka (Kirov) theater is to open its next season here today with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Tsar’s Bride” opera.
Talking to RIA Novosti, people at the Mariinka theater’s press center noted that this was a joint production involving the theater and Holland’s Diaghilev Festival Foundation. The new stage version of this opera was first performed December 10 in Groningen, Holland.
An Overview of Opera at Spoleto Festival USA
Spoleto Festival USA has announced the production of three operas for 2005. These are: Die Vögel (The Birds) Lost when Braunfels was blacklisted by the Nazis in the late 1930s,…
Egypt and Opera at the Museum
De l’Isis de Lully, en 1677, à l’Akhnaten de Philip Glass, en 1984, en passant par l’inoubliable Aïda de Verdi, pas moins de deux cents créations lyriques – cantates, oratorios, opéras et ballets – ont eu pour thème l’Egypte, dont la moitié exclusivement consacrées à Cléopâtre. C’est dire l’attirance que ce pays et ses mystères, réels ou supposées, ont exercée sur les compositeurs et les librettistes, toujours à la recherche d’un nouvel exotisme ou d’un romantisme déchirant.
«Avec la deuxième collection d’égyptologie après celle du Musée Guimet de Lyon, dit Brigitte Bouret, conservateur du musée et commissaire de l’exposition «L’Egypte et l’Opéra», il était légitime que nous nous intéressions à ce thème d’une grande richesse d’autant que j’ai pu travailler avec un égyptologue de renom, Michel Dewachter.»
Der Besuch der alten Dame at TheaterLübeck
Premièring 14 January, TheaterLübeck will present Der Besuch der alten Dame, a schauspiel written in 1956 by the Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990) under the original title Komödie der Hochkonjunktur (Comedy of Business Prosperity), with music by Dietmar Staskowiak. Der Besuch der alten Dame received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best foreign play in 1958-59.
Changes at the Chicago Lyric
No time for Lyric to play it safe Opera company loses Epstein’s voice of innovation By John von Rhein Tribune music critic December 27, 2004 Matthew A. Epstein’s recent departure…
NY TIMES: 2004 in Retrospect
The Voices That Carried the Year By ANNE MIDGETTE OPERA lovers do a fair amount of hand-wringing over the state of singing today. My own pet peeve has been the…