Opera Philadelphia is lightening up the fare at its annual festival with a three evening cabaret series in the Theatre of Living Arts, Queens of the Night.
Category: Reviews
O18: Queens Tries Royally Hard
O18 Magical Mystery Tour: Glass Handel
How to begin to quantify the wonderment stirred in my soul by Opera Philadelphia’s sensational achievement that is Glass Handel?
Magic Lantern Tales: darkness, disorientation and delight from Cheryl Frances-Hoad
“It produces Effects not only very delightful, but to such as know the contrivance, very wonderful; so that Spectators, not well versed in Opticks, that could see the various Apparitions and Disappearances, the Motions, Changes and Actions, that may this way be presented, would readily believe them super-natural and miraculous.”
A lunchtime feast of English song: Lucy Crowe and Joseph Middleton at Wigmore Hall
The September sunshine that warmed Wigmore Street during Monday’s lunch-hour created the perfect ambience for this thoughtfully compiled programme of seventeenth- and twentieth-century English song presented by soprano Lucy Crowe and pianist Joseph Middleton at Wigmore Hall.
O18: Mad About Lucia
Opera Philadelphia has mounted as gripping and musically ravishing an account of Lucia di Lammermoor as is imaginable.
O18 Poulenc Evening: Moins C’est Plus
In Opera Philadelphia’s re-imagined La voix humaine, diva Patricia Racette had a tough “act” to follow …
O18: Unsettling, Riveting Sky on Swings
Opera Philadelphia’s annual festival set the bar very high even by its own gold standard, with a troubling but mesmerizing world premiere, Sky on Wings.
Vaughan Williams: A Sea Symphony — Martyn Brabbins BBCSO
From Hyperion, an excellent new Ralph Vaughan Williams A Sea Symphony with Martyn Brabbins conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and BBC Symphony Chorus, Elizabeth Llewellyn and Marcus Farnsworth soloists. This follows on from Brabbins’s highly acclaimed Vaughan Williams Symphony no 2 “London” in the rarely heard 1920 version.
Simon Rattle — Birtwistle, Holst, Turnage, and Britten
Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra marked the opening of the 2018-2019 season with a blast. Literally, for Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s new piece Donum Simoni MMXVIII was an explosion of brass — four trumpets, trombones, horns and tuba, bursting into the Barbican Hall. When Sir Harry makes a statement, he makes it big and bold !
OSJ: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Harem
Opera San Jose kicked off its 35th anniversary season with a delectably effervescent production of their first-ever mounting of Mozart’s youthful opus, The Abduction from the Seraglio.