Well, well, well, Des Moines Metro Opera has done it again. With their unerringly imaginative and evocative staging of Claude Debussy’s hauntingly lovely masterpiece Pelléas et Mélisande, they have made…
Category: Performances
Songs and Fragments at the Aix Festival
That’s Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) by Peter Maxwell Davies and Kafka-Fragmente (1987) by György Kurtág, an inspired pairing by Pierre Audi, the artistic director of the Aix…
Idomeneo, rè di Creta in Munich
Take a stroll around central Munich and you may come upon a plaque on Altenhofstrasse indicating the spot where Mozart lived in the winter of 1780-81 whilst at work on…
Le grand macabre in Munich
The Fourth of July has obvious political meaning in the United States. This year, it also offered the date of the long-awaited British General Election: a curious event, strangely without…
Madama Butterfly at the Aix Festival
Well, why not? Why not place this iconic statement of Italian verismo in the hands of a hyper-teutonic, avant-garde (ish) stage director, adding in a new-age Italian conductor for good…
A Colourful and Properly Immersive Take on Tippett’s Wacky Last Opera
Tippett’s last opera New Year (premiered at Houston in 1989, given at Glyndebourne the following year and apparently not staged in this country since) looks forwards and backwards as its…
Madau-Diaz’s Tosca returns to the New National Theatre Tokyo
The NNTT commemorated the centenary of Giacomo Puccini’s death with Antonello Madau-Diaz’s very popular production of Tosca under the baton of the renowned Maurizio Benini. Now enjoying its eighth revival,…
Iphigénie at the Aix Festival
Both of them — her death in Aulide and her resurrection in Tauride, back to back, in a surreal world created by Russian stage director Dimitri Tcherniakov, rendered in overdrive…
A finely sung and staged Rake’s Progress from The Grange Festival
Based on Hogarth’s 18th-century morality tale in eight paintings and with a pithy libretto by WH Auden and Chester Kallman, Stravinsky’s operatic farewell to neo-classicism charts Tom Rakewell’s ironic “progress”…
Puccini’s flawed Edgar from Opera Holland Park
A “blunder” was the verdict from Puccini’s biographer Mosco Carner in relation to the composer’s rarely performed second opera. Much has been voiced about the shortcomings of Edgar, Puccini himself…