On Saturday, January 23, 2016, at the University of Arizona’s Crowder Hall, mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton and soprano Amber Wagner gave a delightful recital entitled From Baroque to Broadway. The Baroque was Benjamin Britten’s realization of three Henry Purcell songs: Music for a While, Lost is my Quiet, and What Can We Poor Females Do?
Category: Reviews
The Devil Inside, Scottish Opera
The route that Stuart MacRae and Louse Welsh have taken for their first full-length opera is reassuringly traditional in terms of getting experience of the genre, whilst the resulting work shows itself to be admirably anything but.
Cold Mountain, Philadelphia
Opera Philadelphia deserves congratulations on yet another coup. The company
co-commissioned Cold Mountain, an opera by Jennifer Higdon based on
Gene Scheer’s adaptation of Charles Frazier’s celebrated Civil War
epic.
Christian Gerhaher Wolfgang Rihm Wigmore Hall
For their first of two recitals at the Wigmore Hall, Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber devised an interesting programme – popular Schubert mixed with songs by Wolfgang Rihm and by Huber himself.
Gˆtterd‰mmerung in Palermo
There are not many opera productions that you would cross oceans to see. Graham
Vick’s Gˆtterd‰mmerung in Sicily however compelled such a voyage.
Emmanuel Chabrier L’…toile — Royal Opera House London
PremiËred in 1877 at Offenbach’s own ThÈ‚tre des Bouffes Parisiens, Emmanuel Chabrier’s L’…toile has a libretto, by EugËne Leterrier and Albert Vanloo, which stirs the blackly comic, the farcical and the bizarre into a surreal melange, blending contemporary satire with the frankly outlandish.
Robert Ashley’s Quicksand at the Kitchen
Robert Ashley’s opera-novel Quicksand makes for a novel
experience
Premiere of Raskatov’s Green Mass
One of the leading Russian composers of his generation, Alexander
Raskatov’s reputation in the UK and western Europe derives from several,
recent large-scale compositions, such as his reconstruction of Alfred
Schnittke’s Ninth Symphony from a barely legible manuscript (the work was
first performed in 2007 in the Dresden Frauenkirche by the Dresden Philharmonic
under Dennis Russell Davies), and his 2010 opera A Dog’s Heart,
based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s satire (which was directed by Simon McBurney
at English National Opera in 2010, following the opera’s premiere at
Netherlands Opera earlier that year).
Orpheus in the Underworld, Opera Danube
I’m not sure that St John’s Smith Square was the most
appropriate venue for Opera Danube’s latest production: Jacques
Offenbach’s satirical frolic, Orpheus in the Underworld.
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in Lyon
This nasty little opera evening in Lyon lived up to the opera’s initial reputation as pure pornophony. This is the erotic Shostakovich of the D minor cello sonata, it is the sarcastic and complicated Shostakovich of The Nose . . .