Giuseppe Verdi’s early masterpiece Ernani returned to Lyric Opera of Chicago in a production featuring several outstanding singers. The role of Ernani is sung by Russell Thomas, the part of…
Category: Reviews
The Rape of Lucretia at Snape Maltings
The myth of Lucretia, first told by Livy, tells of the rape of Collatinus’s eponymous wife by his fellow soldier, Tarquinius, the son of the Etruscan king who rules over…
An Anatomy of Melancholy
‘Melancholy can be overcome only by melancholy.’ One imagines that countertenor Iestyn Davies and lutenist Thomas Dunford have taken heed of the words of the English clergyman Robert Burton –…
Ghosts, guilt and giggles: two contrasting Pocket Operas at Wexford Festival Opera
The opening weekend of Wexford Festival Opera 2022 offered not just three operas on the main stage of the National Opera House, but also a lunchtime recital, pop-up events around…
Félicien David’s Lalla-Roukh at Wexford Festival Opera: a forgotten gem
On 23rd September 1876, the ‘Occasional Notes’ column in The Musical World reported that after a performance of the opera Lalla-Roukh by Félicien David (1810-76), one of the musicians made…
Operatic Shock Treatment: Salomé in Paris
A new production of Richard Strauss’s Salomé is playing at Paris’s Opera Bastille. Stage Director Lydia Steier, an American working mostly in Germany, has designed it to shock audiences. In…
Tristan und Isolde at Seattle
Seattle Opera has long championed the operas of Richard Wagner. Legendary impresarios Glynn Ross and Speight Jenkins – the latter, at 85, still cutting a dapper figure in the audience…
Halévy’s La tempesta opens the 71st Wexford Festival Opera
“Be not afeard,” Caliban reassures the comic conspirators, Stephano and Trinculo, “This isle is full of noises,/ Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.” Indeed, the whole…
Dialogues des Carmelites in San Francisco
Poulenc’s masterpiece (1957), Camus’ La Chute (The Fall) Nobel Prize for Literature (1957), Bernstein’s West Side Story (1957), Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954). San Francisco Opera…
Patricia Petibon blurs musical and theatrical boundaries at Oxford Lieder
Back in August, when I spoke to Sholto Kynoch about this year’s Oxford Lieder Festival, he told me that one of the things he was most looking forward to, as…