Itís clear today that Chinaís Cultural Revolution has led to a cultural revolution that ó in music at least ó has made the countryís artists frontrunners on the international scene.
Category: Reviews
JAN¡?EK: Jen?fa
In an evening brimming with sublime performances, Anja Siljja took grasp of her dramatic prowess and left us breathless, yearning for more. At the most sacred opera house in Italy, and perhaps the world, Jan·?ekís opera was thrillingly presented and is an example of our beloved genre at its finest.
Carlos Cogul: Introduction
Carlos Cogul is a London vocal coach and an appreciated baritone giving many a recital ÖÖin the London Tube while commuters hastily pass by to catch their trains. Judging from the photo on this CD he is not a young man any more.
ROSSINI: Bianca e Falliero
The choice between this recording made at the Pesaro Festival in August 2005 and the Opera Rara recording of 2000 will partly be made for non-musical reasons.
Jan Neckers on Recently Reissued Historicals
Almost thirty years ago a century old tradition ended with the last performance of I Maestri Cantatori.
Unsuk Chin’s “Alice in Wonderland”
“Who in the world am I?” proclaimed the posters all over Munich, reducing Lewis Carroll’s famous conundrum to a sound-bite.
Katharina Wagner’s Debut at Bayreuth
If you are in need of a Romantic, Alt-Nuernberg, Beloved-Old-Vaterland-As-It-(Never)-Was sort of production of “Die Meistersinger,” you would probably do well to wait for the Met revival, and stay far far away (actually, add another “far” to that) from the Bayreuth Festpiel’s latest “Skandal”-ripe interpretation.
Ohio Light Opera Festival
For twenty-eight years now the Ohio Light Opera Festival (OLO) has held forth in Wooster in the summertime, presenting no less than 99 different works (their big 100th comes next year), familiar and forgotten, by the likes of Gilbert and Sullivan, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Offenbach, Sigmund Romberg, Carl Zeller and Emmerich K·lm·n — to refer only to the authors of the seven undertaken this year.
A Cloudy Mirror
ìTea: Mirror of the Soulî with book by Xu Ying and music by Tan Dun, revised from an earlier version first produced in Japan in 2002, was to have been the novelty of the present Santa Fe Opera season. Instead, it was dead on arrival.
Glimmerglass Opera 2007 ó An Overview
Glimmerglass Opera is in a watershed year. With the departure of Paul Kellogg, who had considerable success developing that annual festival, General and Artistic Director Michael Macleod has chosen to begin his tenure with a variation on the usual four-opera-season, namely a thematic collection
of pieces based on the “Orpheus” legend. “Don’t look
back” is the marketing catch phrase.