Santa Fe, NM : It is not unusual for Santa Fe Opera to produce little known or
rarely heard operas in their enduring devotion to both unusual and ‘lost’ repertory, as well as commissioned and contemporary works. But is it unusual – very – for two such mountings in one season to be smash hits. Santa Fe lately enjoyed two such successes, graced by elevated musical and performance quality, and strong audience acceptance.
Category: Performances
Santa Fe Opera convinces : Rossini Maometto II
Santa Fe Opera, Karol Szymanowski : King Roger
The gifted Polish composer Karol Szymanowski wrote his three-act King Roger, in the 1920’s. It is an allegorical tale of honor vs. pleasure set to quite beautiful music, especially in the orchestral writing, which Santa Fe chose to play in the same season as the Rossini in a wide tip of the hat to unknown but worthy repertory.
Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin, Opera Holland Park, London
This was unquestionably the best all-round performance I have yet seen from Opera Holland Park, staging and musical performances alike often putting august metropolitan houses from around the world to shame.
Exquisite Juxtapositions : Ian Bostridge, Wigmore Hall
Although John Cage’s Seven Haiku for piano are all about chance and accident, this final concert in Ian Bostridge’s Ancient and Modern series was a masterpiece of meticulous planning and execution.
Beethoven Ninth Symphony, Daniel Barenboim, BBC Prom 18
Few composers seem as remote and yet as necessary to our age as Beethoven, and perhaps the symphonic Beethoven in particular. Irony is a foreign word to him; blazing affirmation and indeed intensity of struggle seem too much for us.
Pierre Boulez : Le marteau sans maÓtre BBC Proms
Pierre Boulez Le marteau sans maÓtre is important as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, says conductor FranÁois-Xavier Roth, who conducted it with members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in BBC Prom 17.
Hector Berlioz, Les Troyens (concert performance, BBC Proms)
Hearing The Trojans in concert at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the Proms was, for me at least, a much happier experience than when it laboured under the crowd-pleasing would-be-musical-comedy served up by David McVicar’s production for the Royal Opera.
Rossini Il viaggio a Reims, Royal Opera House
The Royal Opera House’s Jette Parker Young Artists programme is celebrating the 10th anniversary of their annual Summer Performance.
Christoph PrÈgardien, Wigmore Hall
Seriousness, elegance and insight characterised this recital of nineteenth-century German song in which Christoph PrÈgardien and his accompanist, Julius Drake, conducted a moving musical dialogue, perfectly matching each other in the depiction of unbending obsession and unfulfilled aspiration.
BBC Prom 3: PellÈas et MÈlisande
21st-century opera played on period instruments; a ‘drama-less’ opera; a Dali-esque crimson chaise longue, stranded on the platform of the Royal Albert Hall.