It’s very unusual for the Met these days—or any major opera house, in any era—to present a glossy new production with two different stars in the leading role.
Category: Redbox
Intertwining facets of Italian High Baroque
‘Erotic oratorio’ is the odd-sounding definition devised by modern scholars, such as Howard E. Smither, for those pious music dramas employing sex-laden plots from the Bible, the Apocrypha or the lives of Saints in order to give the audience moral instruction in a quasi-operatic, if generally unstaged, form.
Threepenny Opera, Brooklyn
Should I wait until the end of this review to tell you how much fun, how much of a theatrical whoopee cushion Robert Wilson’s production of Die Dreigroschenoper has been at BAM last week?
Lucrezia Borgia in San Francisco
Bad news travels fast. Though you are about to read another version of how American diva RenÈe Fleming failed to bring Lucrezia Borgia alive, let us begin by discussing a few other things you already know.
Il Trittico, Covent Garden
What do a ferociously violent melodrama, an ecstatic spiritual revelation and an ironic black farce have in common?
Ruhrtriennale’s Luminous Tristan
Bochum’s Jahrhunderthalle, a massive, re-purposed industrial building, seemed an unlikely location to contain and frame the transcendent, unbounded spiritual journey of Wagner’s masterpiece Tristan und Isolde.
Macbeth from Paris and Parma
Superstitions surround theatrical productions of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy.
Santa Fe Musical Delights
Musical excellence was the centerpiece of three of Santa Fe Opera’s annual offerings.
Donizetti’s Marino Faliero at the 2008 Bergamo Music Festival
Gaetano Donizetti is arguably the established opera composer with the highest ratio of failures to successes.
Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Aleksis Kivi
Great characters are at the center of all operatic masterpieces, yet opera almost never treads into “operatic biography” territory.