I was just itching to experience the new Oslo Opera House ever since I saw the pictures of its grand opening (ahead of schedule, thank-you-very-much) last April.
Category: Reviews
Lucia di Lammermoor at the MET
Mary Zimmerman’s unmusical production of Lucia certainly improves if you give it a cast of singers who know what Donizetti is about.
Don Giovanni at the MET
The fascination of Don Giovanni lies not only in the bejeweled score but in the interplay of its eight intriguing characters, each based on an ancient type, yet each somehow cut loose from the formula da Ponte molded so well.
Portraits of Domingo and Pavarotti
While the tributes and retrospectives continue to appear for the late Luciano Pavarotti, his sometime-colleague (if not rival) Pl·cido Domingo maintains a top-rank career, even including a contract with Deutsche Grammophon for new studio work.
STRAUSS: Die Liebe der Danae
Gala may be a budget label, but more opera sets of vintage live performances deserve a booklet essay as concise yet comprehensive, critically honest and yet fair, as Andrew Palmer’s for this set, which preserves a 1980 performance of Richard Strauss and Joseph Grigor’s Die Liebe der Danae.
Falstaff at Pimlico Opera, Cadogan Hall
Pimlico Opera is based at the Grange in Hampshire, home of the Grange Park opera festival, but pre-dates its sister company by a decade and has been giving national tours of popular operas since the 1980s as well as doing some pioneering opera and music theatre projects in UK prisons.
BACH: Mass in B minor
Bach’s monumental Mass in b minor exists in an abundant quantity of period performances to the point where one might ponder the wisdom of adding yet another to the shelf.
Paris Opera’s new production of The Cunning Little Vixen has a lot going for it.
The good news (make that “great news”) is that conductor Dennis Russell Davies had total command over this ever-shifting composition, one minute lyrical and introspective, the next soaring and rhapsodic, the next percussive and agitated.
Turandot without the trimmings
In recent years it’s the headgear of the ice-hearted princess that is often the major source of awe and excitement in productions of Puccini’s incomplete final opera.