Seattle Opera’s current staging of Cenerentola is mostly fun to watch. It is also a great example of how trying too hard to inflate a smallish work to fill a huge auditorium can make fun seem more like work.
Category: Performances
Bottesini’s AlÏ Bab‡ Keeps Them Laughing
On Friday evening October 25, 2019, Opera Southwest opened its 47th season with composer Giovanni Bottesini and librettist Emilio Taddei’s AlÏ Bab‡ in a version reconstructed from the original manuscript score by Conductor Anthony Barrese.
Ovid and Klopstock clash in Jurowski’s Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’
There were two works on this London Philharmonic Orchestra programme given by Vladimir Jurowski – Colin Matthews’s Metamorphosis and Gustav Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’. The way Jurowski played it, however, one might have been forgiven for thinking we were listening to a new work by Mahler, something which may not have been lost on those of us who recalled that Matthews had collaborated with Deryck Cooke on the completion of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony.
Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus: English National Opera
‘All opera is Orpheus,’ Adorno once declared – although, typically, what he meant by that was rather more complicated than mere quotation would suggest. Perhaps, in some sense, all music in the Western tradition is too – again, so long as we take care, as Harrison Birtwistle always has, never to confuse starkness with over-simplification.
The Marriage of Figaro in San Francisco
San Francisco Opera rolled out the first installment of its new Mozart/DaPonte trilogy, a handsome Nozze, by Canadian director Michael Cavanagh to lively if mixed result.
Little magic in Zauberland at the ROH’s Linbury Theatre
To try to conceive of Schumann’s Dichterliebe as a unified formal entity is to deny the song cycle its essential meaning. For, its formal ambiguities, its disintegrations, its sudden breaks in both textual image and musical sound are the very embodiment of the early Romantic aesthetic of fragmentation.
Donizetti’s Don Pasquale packs a psychological punch at the ROH
Is Donizetti’s Don Pasquale a charming comedy with a satirical punch, or a sharp psychological study of the irresolvable conflicts of human existence?
Chelsea Opera Group perform Verdi’s first comic opera: Un giorno di regno
Until Verdi turned his attention to Shakespeare’s Fat Knight in 1893, Il giorno di regno (A King for a Day), first performed at La Scala in 1840, was the composer’s only comic opera.
A humourless hike to Hades: Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld at ENO
Q. “Is there an art form you don’t relate to?” A. “Opera. It’s a dreadful sound – it just doesn’t sound like the human voice.”
Welsh National Opera revive glorious Cunning Little Vixen
First unveiled in 1980, this celebrated WNO production shows no sign of running out of steam. Thanks to director David Pountney and revival director Elaine Tyler-Hall, this Vixen has become a classic, its wide appeal owing much to the late Maria Bj¯rnson’s colourful costumes and picture book designs (superbly lit by Nick Chelton) which still gladden the eye after nearly forty years with their cinematic detail and pre-echoes of Teletubbies.