Category: Reviews

Loft Opera has been hailed as the future of opera by multiple newspapers, magazines, and blogs across the nation, and even said to be “in the process of reinventing opera for the 21^st Century” according to James Jorden from The New York Observer.

Jacques Offenbach’s opÈra fantastique, The Tales of Hoffmann, is a notoriously Protean beast: the composer’s death during rehearsals, four months before the premiere left the opera in an ‘non-definitive’ state which has since led to the acts being shuffled like cards, music being added, spoken dialogue and recitative vying for supremacy, the number of singers performing the principal roles varying, and even changes to the story itself — the latter being an amalgam of three tales by E.T.A. Hoffmann.

Vividly gripping drama is perhaps not phrase which you might expect to be used to refer to Bellini’s I Puritani, but that was the phrase which came into my mind after seen Annilese

As part of their Madness season, presenting three very contrasting music theatre treatments of madness (Handel’s Orlando, Bellini’s I Puritani and Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd) Welsh National Opera (WNO) presented Handel’s Orlando at the Wales Millennium Centre on Saturday 3 October 2015.

Benjamin Britten met Mstislav Rostropovich in 1960, in London, where the cellist was performing Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto. They were introduced by Shostakovich who had invited Britten to share his box at the Royal Festival Hall, for this concert given by the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra. Britten’s biographer, Humphrey Carpenter reports that a few days before Britten had listened to Rostropovich on the radio and remarked that he ‘“thought this the most extraordinary ‘cello playing I’d ever heard”’.

Sir John Falstaff appears in three plays by William Shakespeare: the two Henry IV plays and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

The opening performance of the 2015-2016 season at Lyric Opera of Chicago was the premiere of a new production of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro under the direction of Barbara Gaines and featuring the American debut of conductor Henrik N·n·si.

Opera Philadelphia mixes boutique performances of avant-garde opera in a small house with more traditional productions of warhorse operas performed in the Academy of Music, America’s oldest working opera house.

Four lonely people, bound by love and fate, with inexpressible feelings that boil over in the pressure cooker of war. Àlex Ollé’s conception of Il Trovatore for Dutch National Opera hits the bull’s eye.