The first thing that hits you about the Met’s production of La Rondine is the beauty of the sets and costumes (from the classy team of Ezio Frigerio and Franca Squarciapino, respectively) — especially in contrast to the tawdry glitz of the recent ThaÔs.
Category: Reviews
ThaÔs at the MET
Everyone who likes Massenet’s ThaÔs seems to feel obliged to apologize for it, or to become defensive: it’s not that bad, they all seem to say.
The Play of Daniel — A Medieval Music Drama from Beauvais
Can we call The Play of Daniel an opera, or “music drama” (as this performance put it), when such terms did not exist, and would not exist for centuries to come when the piece was devised, around 1200, by the cathedral chapter of Beauvais?
PAISIELLO: I Giuochi d’Agrigento
Dynamic offers devotees of classical era opera a rare and quite rewarding opportunity to hear I Giuochi d’Agrigento, a little-known opera by Giovanni Paisiello, best known as the man who composed a popular Barbiere di Siviglia before Rossini came along and eclipsed his predecessor.
Best of Neujahrskonzert
An annual event televised around the world, the Vienna Philharmonic’s Neujahrskonzert has become a classical music institution, and as such is impervious to criticism. But not beyond it.
Karita Mattila — Fever
Ondine provides a treasure of a booklet for Fever, Karita Mattila’s traversal of some standards from the so-called “Great American Songbook,” plus two Brazilian numbers.
Berg’s Lulu at Lyric Opera of Chicago
In its new production this fall season of Alban Berg’s Lulu, Lyric Opera of Chicago has achieved a near ideal synthesis of music and drama.
H‰nsel and Gretel at Covent Garden
Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel is titled a M‰rchenspiel — a Fairytale: and as twentieth-century psychologists and psychoanalysts have been eager to inform us, lurking beneath those familiar saccharine stories of sleeping princesses, defeated tyrants, love fulfilled and harmony restored, lie the dark shadows of the human heart — passionate, violent, unpredictable and unredeemed.
ThaÔs: A Star Vehicle — In Overdrive
The Metropolitan Opera’s high-definition broadcast on radio and by satellite to movie theatres around the Nation, December 20 was Jules Massent’s 1894 star vehicle, ThaÔs — the sadly ironic tale of a 4th Century Egyptian courtesan who grows tired of the long hours and demanding nature of her work, and is thinking of a career change.
I mori di Valenza — Ponchielli’s Unfinished Opera
It almost seems as if every composer was entitled to have at least one unfinished work.