This is an opera written with a cannon and a feather. There is sensory
overload—an overload of sensory overload: lights that shine into your face in
the manner of an ophthalmologist scanning your retina; eerie, too-loud sounds
that invade you from every direction; dancing patterns of light that may
resolve into huge words or huge faces; a great chandelier-harp that sometimes
descends to be played, a strumming like the sounds of the sirens in Plato’s
parable of the concentric crystalline spheres.
Category: Reviews
Machover, Death and the Powers
Philip Glass’s OrphÈe
With voices of doom predicting the end of the CD format — supposedly to be replaced by downloading — the ancillary art of CD packaging also faces a grim future.
Bellini’s I Puritani in Bologna
Vincenzo Bellini’s operas are pure bel canto, with beautiful singing placed above all other considerations.
RomÈo et Juliette, New York
Is Guy Joosten’s staging of RomÈo et Juliette the
best-looking production in the Met’s current repertory or what?
Magnificent Mahler by Shanghai Symphony
It was, of course, only a coincidence, but a week of ideal spring weather — no rain and low humidity — found Shanghai in a perfect mood for an all-Mahler program by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra on March 12.
The Queen of Spades, New York
Tchaikovsky’s Pikovaia Dama (The Queen of Spades) is the longest Mad Scene in opera. Ghermann is already half nuts when we meet him in the park in St. Petersburg on a windy day, and he gets crazier from scene to scene.
Aida, London
Strict courtly hierarchies and the repressed formality of ritual juxtaposed
with violent sexual jealousy and lurid erotic excess … a stage-world
more suited to the Straussian insalubrity of SalomÈ than to the epic
grandeur of Verdi’s Aida, perhaps?
Lucia, New York
It costs a lot to look cheap. And it takes a village to raise a child. In
the case of the Metropolitan Opera’s current revival of Donizetti’s
Lucia di Lammermoor, it takes a lot of talent to produce underwhelming
opera.
Gheorghiu and Domingo in Giordano’s Fedora
A major label release of a new studio recording of a full opera — with the traditional booklet/libretto — wanders onto the scene almost like a lost and lonely unicorn.
Cecilia Bartoli in HalÈvy’s Clari
A key measure of operatic star power is the ability to get an obscure work staged — think Joan Sutherland and her run in Massenet’s Esclarmonde, an outlandish wallow in orchestral excess ladled over a libretto of unfathomable goofiness.