Bizet’s youthful masterpiece is notoriously difficult to stage. Up to now I have not seen a production which is not slightly ridiculous. So it is an ideal opera for a concert performance or a listening experience. If you are looking for an authentic performance this is not the one to go for.
Category: Reviews
BERNSTEIN: Peter Pan
Alexander Frey, upon learning that a song Leonard Bernstein had written for the 1950 production of Peter Pan had been cut before the show opened, wondered if there was other music originally intended for the production that went by the wayside.
NIELSEN: Maskarade
From the start of its lively and distinctive overture Carl Nielsen’s 1906 comic masterpiece Maskarade calls for a light and ironic approach, yet one which brings the ensemble forward with sufficient directorial force.
ROSSINI: Equivoco Stravagante
A DVD performance of an opera may deserve recommendation for a single memorable performance, or because a rare work has finally been recorded, or simply for nostalgia’s sake. How many DVDs primarily offer the pleasures of a witty, imaginative staging, done on a minimal budget?
Donizetti’s Rita at the Wiener Kammeroper
On the evening of 28 July, I had the privilege to attend the Wiener Kammeroper’s performance of Donizetti’s Rita. Subtitled “The Battered Husband,” this one act farce revolves around Rita, the owner of a cafe, and her husband Beppe (Jose Aparicio).
FAURÉ: Requiem and Other Works
The Requiem mass of Gabriel Fauré is often unfairly overshadowed by other 19th century settings of the mass. The monumental works of Giuseppe Verdi and Hector Berlioz achieve moments of extreme drama by stretching the limits of soloists, chorus, and orchestra. Fauré’s Requiem, in contrast, is an intimate vision of heavenly peace in the afterlife. The soaring melodic lines and compact harmonic progressions evoke profundity through beauty and simplicity.
MENDELSSOHN: Athalia
In addition, to his popular score to A Midsummer Night’s Dream Felix Mendelssohn wrote incidental music to several other plays. Commissioned by the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the incidental music to Athalia was intended for a private performance of the play by Jean Racine.
The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn
The Cambridge companion series provides one of the more scholarly and intensely interesting examinations of musical composers currently available. This is because of its in-depth and multifaceted contributions to each volume, by a variety of musicologists and musicians, as well as overall management of each volume by a well-established and known scholar in the field. The Mendelssohn volume is no exception in this area. It is a collection of fourteen essays that examine the life and work of the nineteenth-century Romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn. It is divided into four major sections: Issues in Biography, Situating the Compositions, Profiles of the Music, and Reception and Performance.
RACHMANINOV: Symphony No. 1 in D minor, Op.13; The Isle of the Dead, Op.29.
The initial reception of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 1 marked an unhappy yet decisive moment in the composer’s life, one that propelled his stylistic development and the trajectory of his career in new directions.
HELLER: Emblems of Eloquence — Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice
In her awesome Emblems of Eloquence, Wendy Heller tirelessly investigates treatises, myths, libretti and letters to illuminate the natures of “real” and “imagined” women who reigned over seventeenth-century opera as subjects of musical portraiture. From Dido to Semiramide, Poppea to Calisto, Heller argues that women and women’s issues dominated the Venetian stage. Librettists struggled with issues of women’s sexuality, dominance, suppression of desire, overt desire, covert desire, homoeroticism and misogyny. And all at the time when, “Venice’s absolute exclusion of women in public life was written into the organization of the Republic.” This apparent contradiction is at the heart of her eminently readable text that displays Heller as a musicological Simon Schama.