Category: Reviews

Michael Christie, now 34, was too young to see John Corigliano’s Ghosts of Versailles when it was new at the Metropolitan Opera in 1991.

Although productions of Gioachino Rossini’s MosË in Egitto
are infrequent, the lively debate on successive versions of the work has
generally led to questions of priority and to informative discussions on
performance history.

According to Paulus Diaconus’ Historia Langobardorum, both
Lombard sovereigns warring for supremacy in late 7th-century Italy — the
legitimate king Perctarit and Grimuald the usurper — behaved rather fairly to
each other and their families.

Period instruments and nineteenth-century grand opera are seldom found on the same stage — or even the same sentence — but as adventurous practitioners increasingly experiment in the repertoire of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, it’s a sight and sound that will inevitably become more familiar.

Franz Schreker, born in 1878, was a youth in the age in which psychoanalysis
first bloomed. In music, far from coincidentally, it was the post-Wagnerian era
when western tonality had been liberated from traditional rules but was
uncertain which new path to take.

Maria di Rohan was Donizetti’s penultimate opera, composed in
Italian for Vienna in 1843, with revisions to appeal to the taste of Paris and
Milan following.

Fairy Tales are often short on character, motivation and development. The stock figures are either good or bad, they are usually archetypal, and stand not only for themselves but larger dimensions of humanity.

Despite its length and pretentions to being serious opera, Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, dating from the 1880s, remains a leaky vessel adrift on a sea of self-fulfilling prophesies of doom.