The story was bigger than its actors, the Tosca ritual was ignored. It wasn’t a Tosca for the ages though maybe it was (San Francisco’s previous Tosca production hung around for 95 years). P.S. It was an evening of powerful theater, and incidentally it was really good opera.
Category: Reviews
Fine performances in uneven War Requiem at the Concertgebouw
At the very least, that vehement, pacifist indictment against militarism, Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, should leave the audience shaking a little. This performance by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra only partially succeeded in doing so. The cast credits raised the highest expectations, but Gianandrea Noseda, stepping in for an ailing Mariss Jansons and conducting the RCO for the first time, did not bring out the full potential at his disposal.
The Tallis Scholars at Cadogan Hall
In their typical non-emphatic way, the Tallis Scholars under Peter Phillips
presented here a selection of English sacred music from the Eton Choirbook
to Tallis. There was little to ruffle anyone’s feathers here, little
in the way of overt ‘interpretation’ – certainly in a
modern sense – but ample opportunity to appreciate the mastery on
offer in this music, its remoteness from many of our present concerns, and
some fine singing.
Dido and Aeneas: Academy of Ancient Music
“Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.” Well, the spectral Queen of Carthage atop the poppy-strewn sarcophagus wasn’t quite yet “laid in earth”, but the act of remembering, and remembrance, duly began during the first part of this final instalment of the Academy of Ancient Music’s Purcell trilogy at the Barbican Hall.
Poignantly human – Die Zauberflˆte, La Monnaie
Mozart Die Zauberflˆte (The Magic Flute) at La Monnaie /De Munt, Brussels, conducted by Antonello Manacorda, directed by Romeo Castellucci. Part allegory, part Singspeile, and very much a morality play, Die Zauberflˆte is not conventional opera in the late 19th century style. Naturalist realism is not what it’s meant to be. Cryptic is closer to what it might mean.
Covent Garden: Wagner’s Siegfried, magnificent but elusive
How do you begin to assess Covent Garden’s Siegfried? From a purely vocal point of view, this was a magnificent evening; it’s hard not to reach the conclusion that this was as fine a cast as you are likely to hear anywhere today.
Powerful Monodramas: Zender, Manoury and Schoenberg
The concept of the monologue in opera has existed since the birth of opera itself, but when we come to monodramas – with the exception of Rousseau’s Pygmalion (1762) – we are looking at something that originated at the beginning of the twentieth century.
ENO’s Salome both intrigues and bewilders
Femme fatale, femme nouvelle, she-devil: the personification of patriarchal castration-anxiety and misogynistic terror of female desire.
In the Company of Heaven: The Cardinall’s Musick at Wigmore Hall
Palestrina led from the front, literally and figuratively, in this performance at Wigmore Hall which placed devotion to the saints at its heart, with Saints Peter, Paul, Catherine of Alexandria, Bartholomew and the Virgin Mary all musically honoured by The Cardinall’s Musick and their director Andrew Carwood.
Roberto Devereux in San Francisco
Opera’s triple crown, Donizetti’s tragic queens — Anna Bolena who was beheaded by her husband Henry VIII, their daughter Elizabeth I who beheaded her rival Mary, Queen of Scots and who executed her lover Roberto Devereux.