Category: Reviews

2012 was a good year for Swiss tenor Mauro Peter. He participated at the Young Singers Project of the Salzburg Festival under the baton of Ivor Bolton, and won 1^st Prize and the Audience Prize at the Peter Schumann Competition in Zwickau.

With 27 named roles and a large orchestra (including instruments such as mandolins), Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s 1911 opera, I gioielli della Madonna (The Jewels of the Madonna) might seem a surprising choice for a relatively small opera house like the Slovak National Theatre / SlovenskÈ n·rodnÈ divadlo (SND) in Bratislava, Slovakia.

Donizetti’s Poliuto at Glyndebourne could well become one of of the great Glyndebourne classics.

Pacific Opera Project, a small Los Angeles company, presented a production of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos at the Ebell Club with an excellent group of young singers at the beginning of what should be good careers.

Six people, dressed in ordinary clothing, sitting in a row at desks adorned only with microphones and glasses of water, and talking for ninety minutes: is it opera?

The spring concert of Rising Stars in Concert, sponsored by and featuring current members of the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center at Lyric Opera of Chicago, showcased a number of talents that will no doubt continue to grace the stages of the world’s operatic theaters.

New York Opera Exchange’s production of Carmen from May 8^th to 10^th highlighted that which opera devotees have been saying for years: Opera, far from being dead, is vibrant and evolving.

I have sometimes lamented the preference of Ian Page’s Classical Opera for concert performances and recordings over staged productions, albeit that their renditions of eighteenth-century operas and vocal works are unfailingly stylish, illuminating and supported by worthy research.