‘When two men like us set out to produce a “trifle”, it has to become a very serious trifle’, wrote Hofmannsthal to Strauss during the gestation of their opera about opera.
Category: Reviews
Leoö Jan·?ek : The Cunning Little Vixen, Garsington Opera at Wormsley
Jan·?ek started The Cunning Little Vixen on the cusp of old age in 1922 and there is something deeply elegiac about it.
La Traviata in Marseille
It took only a couple of years for Il trovatore and Rigoletto to make it from Italy to the OpÈra de Marseille, but it took La traviata (Venice, 1853) sixteen years (Marseille, 1869).
Madama Butterfly in San Francisco
Gesamtkunstwerk, synthesis of fable, sound, shape and color in art, may have been made famous by Richard Wagner, and perhaps never more perfectly realized than just now by San Francisco Opera.
Luca Francesconi : Quartett, Linbury Studio Theatre, London
Luca Francesconi is well-respected in the avant garde. His music has been championed by the Arditti Quartett and features regularly in new music festivals. His opera Quartett has at last reached London after well-received performances in Milan and Amsterdam.
Puccini Manon Lescaut, Royal Opera House, London
Manon Lescaut at the Royal Opera House, London, brings out the humanity which lies beneath Puccini’s music. The composer was drawn to what we’d now called “outsiders. In Manon Lescaut, Puccini describes his anti-heroine with unsentimental honesty. His lush harmonies describe the way she abandons herself to luxury, but he doesn’t lose sight of the moral toughness at the heart of AbbÈ PrÈvost’s story, Manon is sensual but, like her brother, fatally obssessed with material things. Only when she has lost everything else does she find true values through love..
The Pearl Fishers, ENO
Writing in a programme article to accompany this first revival of her 2010 production of Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, director Penny Woolcock remarks upon the opera’s ‘plethora of beautiful arias, duets, choral and orchestral music … and catchy tunes that spawn earworms’.
Britten: Owen Wingrave, Aldeburgh Music Festival
An ideal choice for this year’s Aldeburgh Music Festival, Britten’s Owen Wingrave. From a very early age, Britten was incensed by bullying and repression.
Show Boat in San Francisco
To be uncomplimentary about the current production of Show Boat at San Francisco Opera will surely provoke a summons to appear before the House Un-American Activities Commission.
La Traviata in San Francisco
La Traviata has hit the stage at San Francisco Opera every three to five years (even annually in some periods) since 1924. Surprises have been rare.