Opera companies around the world — though relatively few in the United States — cannot resist the temptation to stage Sergei Prokofiev’s first major opera.
Category: Reviews
BBC Prom 73: Der Freisch¸tz
Why would a French composer take an opera which epitomises German Romanticism and Nationalism and adapt it to the conventions of the French grand opera tradition?
Santa Fe Faust — Revisited
The distinguished soprano Patricia Racette once advised this observer, “If you are coming to the opera to review me, please attend the latest performance you can.” I knew what she meant.
Les Troyens by La Fura dels Baus
When the opera opens, a chorus of Trojan is rejoicing that the Greeks have abandoned the war and gone home.
Prom 67: Beethoven, Mass in D major, op.123
I shall not beat about the bush: this was a great performance.
Glyndebourne’s Billy Budd
Hermann Melville wrote a poem called “Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the Twelfth Century”:
Ruhrtriennale’s Luminous Tristan
Bochum’s Jahrhunderthalle, a massive, re-purposed industrial building, seemed an unlikely location to contain and frame the transcendent, unbounded spiritual journey of Wagner’s masterpiece Tristan und Isolde.
Macbeth from Paris and Parma
Superstitions surround theatrical productions of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy.
Verdi’s Requiem Closes Grant Park Festival
In its final performances of the Summer 2011 season the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus along with guest soloists gave two performances of Verdi’s Requiem.