Category: Performances

The Los Angeles opera company ended its 2011-2012 season with Giacomo
Puccini’s long-loved La BohËme, in a long-lived production. What is
it about this opera that keeps old loves alive?

Kudos to the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association and Gustavo Dudamel for their courageous plan to present semi staged performances of the Mozart/Da Ponte trilogy of Italian operas with the assistance of outstanding set and costume designers and directors.

In David McVicar’s staging of Strauss’s disturbing opera, first seen at
Covent Garden in 2008 and now enjoying its second revival, Salome’s descent
down the Stygian staircase is a literal drop into a subterranean slaughterhouse
and an ethical fall into the delights and depravity of her of burgeoning yet deadly sexuality.

Canadian Opera Company’s diverse May offerings included some superlatively sung Handel, a galvanizing star turn from a rising tenor talent, and a well-matched veristic double bill of tragedy and comedy.

Yannis Kokkos originally directed and designed Tristan und Isolde as a co-production for Welsh National Opera and Scottish Opera nearly 20 years ago. The production’s latest revival, directed by Peter Watson, was premiered at the Wales Millennium Centre on 19 May 2012.

Iestyn Davies’ Wigmore Hall recital, ‘History Repeating’, may have explored various composers’ engagement with, and reinterpretation and reinvigoration of, music of the past, but Davies himself is very much the countertenor of the moment, and undoubtedly an exciting and fulfilling future lies ahead.