Before a single track has been heard, Jordi Savall’s The Forgotten Kingdom impresses with its scale: a three-CD set packaged in a lavish, bound book that contains fifty dense pages of English commentary by nine different authors; adding the multiple translations, beautiful illustrations, and song texts, the book itself luxuriantly sprawls over 500 pages.
Category: Reviews
Ian Bostridge, Wigmore Hall
“Music, music for a while/ Shall all your cares beguile,” vowed Ian Bostridge at the opening of this recital with his regular accompanist, Julius Drake.
Les Noces de Figaro in Paris
This is the one by Giorgio Strehler that opened at Versailles in 1973 and since has endured twenty-three incarnations, first at the Garnier and later at the Bastille.
James Bowman, The Last London Recital
It’s easy to slip into platitudes when eulogising the last London
recital performance of a singer commonly lauded as the outstanding countertenor
of his generation.
I Compagnacci and Il Re, Teatro Grattacielo
Teatro Grattacielo gives concert performances of Verismo operas that range from the obscure to the unheard-of.
Macbeth, Royal Opera
Phyllida Lloyd’s reading of Verdi’s Macbeth –
first seen in 2002 and here revived for the second time – could certainly
not be described as ‘subtle’, either dramatically or visually.
Die Meistersinger von N¸rnberg, Glyndebourne
Glorious sunshine for Glyndebourne Opera’s Die Meistersinger von N¸rnberg on the eve of Richard Wagner’s birthday.
Richard Coeur-de-Lion, New York
AndrÈ-Modeste GrÈtry, the greatest opera composer ever to come from Belgium, made his way to Paris in 1767 at the age of 26.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ENO
On my travels, I often hear occasional opera-goers complain about having wasted time and money on a production that, on the night, bears no relation to their expectations.
Opera Remade, 1700-1750
This substantial book is one of the latest in the Ashgate series of
collected essays in opera studies and draws together articles from a disparate
group of scholarly journals and collected volumes, some recent, some now
difficult to locate.