Category: Performances

For the first hour or so of the latest Opera Orchestra of New York venture, a concert performance of Wagner’s Rienzi, I often said to myself, This…isn’t so terrible.

Repeatedly revived since its final appearance in 1995, Jonathan
Miller’s CosÏ fan tutte returned yet again to the Covent Garden
stage as the second part of the ‘Olympic’ cycle of Mozart-Da Ponte
collaborations.

A year or two back, Opera Lafayette, the Washington-based company that
specializes in eighteenth-century obscuritÈs franÁaises, presented
Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny’s Le Magnifique, an
opÈra-comique about a race horse.

Introducing the winter-spring season, ROH Chief Executive Tony Hall explains the (perhaps a tad spurious) Olympic ‘concept’ which has inspired the season’s programming, the five interlocking rings of the Olympic insignia motivating the performance of a series of works staged in ‘cycle form’.

Founded in 1984, the Basel Chamber Orchestra has developed a penchant for
programmes which combine the modern and unfamiliar with the traditional and
renowned.

Three La BohËmes in ten days, a critic’s nightmare that was more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

This year is a big year for the Met. Of the seven new productions on the roster, two are the last two installments of a much-anticipated Robert Lepage Ring.

This buoyant, refreshing performance of Haydn’s late oratorio, The Seasons, by Paul McCreesh’s superb Gabrieli Consort and Players conjured
a calendric kaleidoscope of seasonal climes, from the warm bucolic breezes of spring to summer’s fierce suns and flashing storms, from autumnal harvests and hunts to the frozen mists and fiery hearth-sides of winter.

Composed during the spring hunting season of 1684, for a patron and performance venue unknown, Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s brief six-scene Opera de Chasse (‘Hunting Opera’), ActÈon, has remained seldom performed and something of a mystery.