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.
Category: Performances
Mahler, Royal Festival Hall
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!
Lucrezia Borgia in San Francisco
Bad news travels fast. Though you are about to read another version of how American diva RenÈe Fleming failed to bring Lucrezia Borgia alive, let us begin by discussing a few other things you already know.
Atys, Brooklyn Academy of Music
In 1989, William Christie’s ten-year-old Paris-based baroque troupe, Les Arts Florissants, brought a staged production to the Brooklyn Academy of Music for the first time, Lully’s Atys.
Christian Gerhaher, Wigmore Hall
Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber presented Schubert’s song cycles at the Wigmore Hall, London.
Lawrence Zazzo, Wigmore Hall
Lawrence Zazzo’s last visit to the Wigmore Hall, in April earlier this year, saw him present an intriguing sequence of American song from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The Passenger, ENO, London
The circumstances behind Mieczys?aw Weinberg’s The Passenger at the ENO, London, are extraordinary.
Stars of Lyric Opera at Millennium Park, Chicago
In a program of Italian and French arias and duets Lyric Opera gave to
Chicago audiences a preview of the first operas in its forthcoming season and
an opportunity to hear familiar voices as well as those soon destined to grace
the operatic stages of the world.
Turandot in San Francisco
Los Angeles has been good to Turandot. The gritty 1984 Andre Serban production inaugurated an opera company in Los Angeles where a mere eight years later L.A. Opera bestowed the splendid Luciano Berio ending upon the world in an uber-pompous Gian-Carlo del Monaco production.
La tragedia di Tosca at the Washington National Opera
Whether or not one agrees with Joseph Kerman’s immortal definition of
Tosca as a “shabby little shocker,” Puccini’s
melodramma, the inaugural production of the Washington National
Opera’s 2011-12 season, is intense, “blood-and-guts” kind of
entertainment.