Abduction from the Seraglio contains not a single ironic or cynical moment. Enlightened mercy and sincere love triumph totally over revenge, slavery and tyranny.
Category: Performances
Paris: Tenors Trump Befuddled Productions
Two recent outings at the Paris OpÈra might have been subtitled: “Max Bialystock is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.”
Zurich’s Magnificent ‘Other’ Moor
Right to the musical ‘score’ board: Zurich Opera stared down the mighty challenge posed by Rossini’s Otello ossia il moro di Venezia, and knocked it out of the ballpark.
Simon Boccanegra, LA
Sometime everything seems to go right. Just as the Los Angeles Opera Company
did last fall, it opened its spring season with a baritonal eponymous opera; this time, Giuseppe Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra.
Rusalka, Royal Opera
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an interesting opera production will be met with incomprehension and lazy, philistine hostility by vast swathes of the audience in many, perhaps most, of the world’s ‘major’ houses, a truth that renders one all the more grateful for the Royal Opera showing the courage to stage this new — to London — production of Rusalka.
Beatrice and Benedict at the Wales Millennium Centre
Welsh National Opera presented a rather undercooked account of Berlioz’s tricky opera, in a revival of Elijah Moshinsky’s classic production
John Adams — Death of Klinghoffer, London
John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer is on at the English National Opera, London.
“Figures from the Antique”, Wigmore Hall
Modern and historic responses to classical tragedy and myth formed the unifying focus for this latest stage of Ian Bostridge’s year-long ‘Ancient and Modern’ project at the Wigmore Hall.
Moby-Dick, San Diego
When Captain Ahab sailed the Pequod into San Diego this week, he brought a new American opera with him. Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick is a stunning work likely to have universal appeal.