“I wrote it almost without noticing.” So Verdi declared when reminded of his eighth — and perhaps least frequently performed, opera, Alzira. One might say that, since he composed the work, no-one else has much noticed either.
Category: Reviews
Les Contes d’Hoffmann in San Francisco
Just when you thought the protagonist was Hoffmann! Who, rather what stole the show?
La Tosca in Los Angeles
When is verismo verily veristic? Or what is a virginal girl dressed in communion white doing in the two murderous acts of the Los Angeles Opera’s current production of Tosca? And why does she sing the shepherd’s song?
Saverio Mercadante: I due Figaro
Though 2013 is the bicentennial of the births of Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner, the releases of Cecilia Bartoli’s recording of Bellini’s Norma on DECCA, a new studio recording of Donizetti’s Caterina Cornaro from Opera Rara, and this premiËre recording of Saverio Mercadante’s forgotten I due Figaro, suggest that this is the start of a summer of bel canto.
Lohengrin, Welsh National Opera
Wagner’s Lohengrin is not an unfamiliar visitor to the UK thanks,
in the main, to Elijah Moshinsky’s perennial production at Covent Garden.
Philip Glass: The Perfect American
Philip Glass’s The Perfect American at the ENO in London is a visual treat, but the libretto is mind-numbingly anodyne.
Christian Thielemann’s Der Ring des Nibelungen
Recording Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen is for a
record label equivalent to a climber reaching the summit of Mount Everest: it is the zenith from which a label surveys its position among its rivals and appreciates an achievement that can define its reputation for a generation.†
Cecilia Bartoli as Norma
Few people who love opera in general and bel canto in particular have never heard the comment made by Lilli Lehmann, veteran of the inaugural Ring at Bayreuth in 1876, that singing all three of Wagner’s Br¸nnhildes—in Die Walk¸re, Siegfried, and
Gˆtterd‰mmerung, respectively, all of which she sang to great acclaim—pales in comparison with singing the title rÙle in Bellini’s Norma.†
Jonathan Dove’s Mansfield Park
Jonathan Dove’s Mansfield Park, with libretto by his regular collaborator Alasdair Middleton, has the remarkable distinction of being the first completed operatic adaptation of any Jane Austen novel to be staged.
Wagner 200th Anniversary Concert
London’s two principal opera companies have offered a baffling
near-silence as their response to Wagner’s two-hundredth anniversary.