‘Requiescant in pace. Amen.’
Category: Performances
Threepenny Opera, Brooklyn
Should I wait until the end of this review to tell you how much fun, how much of a theatrical whoopee cushion Robert Wilson’s production of Die Dreigroschenoper has been at BAM last week?
La Traviata and the Credit Crunch
One way of thinking about La Traviata is to consider it as a portrayal of bubble wealth that makes artistic capital from the shimmering, rainbow hues of the surface rather than showing any interest in what sustains the bubble.
Mahler 8, Royal Festival Hall
Following Lorin Maazel’s lifeless first movement from Mahler’s Tenth Symphony
CosÏ fan tutte, Los Angeles
The Los Angeles Opera Company’s charmingly understated new production
of CosÏ fan tutte will please your eyes and delight your ears, but its story might grieve your romantic soul.
Carmen, Philadelphia
There are two ways to sing the role of Carmen: as a “grand opera” heroine and as a character from opÈra-comique.
Eugene Onegin, Los Angeles
Kudos to the Los Angeles Opera Company for expanding its heretofore limited
Russian repertoire and opening its 26th season with Tchaikovsky’s
Eugene Onegin. The romantic work based on the novel in verse of the
same name by Alexander Pushkin, is likely everyone’s favorite
Tchaikovsky opera.
Mahler, Royal Festival Hall
My response to much of this and last year’s Mahler anniversary bonanza
has been to stay away: certainly not out of antipathy, nor out of boredom, nor on account of any other negative reaction to the music of a composer whom I admire as greatly as ever, but simply because there are too many unnecessary performances of that music on offer.
Faust, Royal Opera House
When the Royal Opera House London does things well, it does them very well indeed. This Gounod’s Faust was a sizzler!
The Inaugural Cambridge Handel Festival: a rosy dawn?
The haughty beauties that are the ancient colleges of Cambridge were definitely feeling the heat this past weekend, and not even the cooling streams of the Cam and its tributaries could assuage the heat of an Indian summer in the Fens of Eastern England.