La Fille du Regiment, Royal Opera

The regiment marches onwards!

Show Boat at Lyric Opera of Chicago

Lyric Opera of Chicago has begun with the current season’s production of Show Boat a series of musicals of the American theater to be featured in coming years.

Wolfgang Rihm’s Jakob Lenz by ENO

When the ENO does really innovative work, it does so with style. Wolfgang Rihm’s Jakob Lenz may have taken 34 years to reach London fully staged, but this ENO production made such a strong impression that it might be years before it will be forgotten.

Folk songs that aren’t folk songs

The Wigmore Hall Dvo?·k series culminated in a concert by Bernarda Fink and Roger Vignoles.

Armide, Opera Atelier

I have to rethink my week, because somehow I have to get to see Opera Atelier’s production of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Armide again.

Il Sogno di Scipione

It’s unclear whether Mozart composed this highly undramatic “dramatic action” when he was fifteen, for his kindly master Prince-Archbishop von Schrettenbach of Salzburg, or the following year for the newly-elected successor, Prince-Archbishop Colloredo, who, soon afterwards, had the young man literally kicked out of his service.

The Dream of Gerontius, Barbican Hall

Edward Elgar was given a copy of Cardinal Newman’s ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ — a 900-line poem depicting the journey of an old man’s soul after death — as a wedding present in 1889.

OpÈra Comique’s Muted Auber

Paris’ OpÈra Comique has summoned forth a respectable (if spare) set design for Bluebeard’s Castle, but unfortunately the opera they were performing was Auber’s La Muette de Portici.

Sandrine Piau, Wigmore Hall

Sandrine Paiu and Roger Vignoles teamed up for the latest concert in Vignoles’s “Perspectives” series at the Wigmore Hall, London.

Sarasota Opera’s 2012 Winter Festival

Opera-goers have come to expect high quality opera as part of Sarasota Opera’s Winter Festival.