Des Moines Metro Opera closed their wholly winning 47th festival season with a wondrously sung, theatrical vivid, and emotionally bewitching treatment of
Puccini’s evergreen masterpiece, La bohËme.
Category: Reviews
Sublime Bohemians Captivate Indianola
Des Moines: Best of All Possible Candide’s?
The version of Bernstein’s and (too-many-collaborators-to-mention) Candide that inhabited the Des Moines Metro Opera festival had a great deal to recommend it.
Profoundly Bone-chilling Wozzeck
If any further proof were needed that Des Moines Metro Opera is at the forefront of operatic excellence in America, their theatrically searing, musically impeccable Wozzeck would cement this assertion.
Des Moines Cooks Up a Novel Treat
Des Moines Metro Opera delights in coming up with site-specific operatic presentations, and Bon Appetit was triumphantly produced in the handsome hall of the Iowa Culinary Institute.
The VOCES8 Foundation is launched at St Anne & St Agnes
Where might you hear medieval monophony by the late 12th-century French composer PÈrotin, Renaissance polyphony by William Byrd, a vocal arrangement of the stirring theme from Sibelius’s tone poem Finlandia, alongside a newly commissioned work, ‘Vertue’ (2019) by Jonathan Dove, followed by an arrangement of the Irish folksong ‘Danny Boy’ and a snappy rendition of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s ‘One Note Samba’ arr. for eight voices by Naomi Crellin, all within 90 minutes?
A stirring War and Peace by WNO at Covent Garden
In an essay published in 1868, Tolstoy wrote: ‘What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, still less a poem, still less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is that which the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it has been expressed.’
‘Secrets and Lies’: a terrific double bill at Opera Holland Park
If you need a sweet bonbon to accompany the canapÈs and champagne on a sparkling summer evening, then Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s one-act trifle
Gerald Finzi Choral Works
From Hyperion, Gerald Finzi choral works with the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, conducted by Stephen Layton. An impressive Magnificat (1952) sets the tone.
The 2019 Jette Parker Young Artists Summer Performance
This year’s Jette Parker Young Artists Summer Performance offered a veritable operatic smˆrgÂsbord, presenting sizable excerpts from operas ranging from Gluck to Saint-SaÎns, from Mozart to Debussy, by way of some Italian masterpieces, courtesy of Rossini and Verdi.
Cilea’s L’arlesiana at Opera Holland Park
In a rank order of suicidal depressives, Federico – the ProvenÁal peasant besotted with ‘the woman from Arles’, L’arlesiana, who yearns to break free from his mother’s claustrophobic grasp, who seeks solace from betrayal and disillusionment in the arms of a patient childhood sweetheart, but who is ultimately broken by deluded dreams and unrequited passion – would surely give many a Thomas Hardy protagonist a run for their money.