Riccardo Chailly’s tenure as Music Director of Teatro alla Scala is ending. Myung-Whun Chung will take over later this year. Over the past decade, Chailly has conducted one Verdi opera…
Category: Performances
Rattle Returns to the LSO with Gerhard, Richard Strauss and Mahler
Vocal qualities matter enormously. Not just when it comes to the process of casting in the opera house, but when radically different items are programmed together in concert. I have…
Vive la Révolution à Wilmington!
Opera Delaware has served up such a bloody good, full-throated rendition of Giordano and Illica’s Andrea Chénier, that the cheering audience could not have been more boisterous in its rapturous…
A Pop-Up Potion: L’elisir d’amore Leaps from the Page at the NNTT
The New National Theatre Tokyo recently presented the fifth revival of Cesare Lievi’s popular 2010 production of L’elisir d’amore. At the 16 May matinee, the foyer buzzed with an audience…
Exceptional Student Performances of Britten’s Rape of Lucretia from The Royal Academy of Music
“It’s not exactly a work you enjoy” were words I overheard during the interval of this hugely impressive production of Britten’s first chamber opera given by Royal Academy of Music…
A Musically Triumphant New The Barber of Seville in Hamburg
How far are you prepared to go if you really, really want something? Would you stop at nothing, save perhaps murder? When it’s a question of naked political power, all…
Traditional Virtues: Andrea Chénier at OperaDelaware
During the French Revolution, a secret police chief arrests a politically radical artist in order to extort sex from his glamorous girlfriend. Puccini’s Tosca? Nope, Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chénier. Puccini’s…
Washington Bach Consort Closes Season with Stunning Mass in B Minor
Composer Arnold Bax once compared Bach’s last movements to “the running of a sewing machine.” If that be the case, surely they constitute the most epic runnings of sewing machines…
Wozzeck as Photonovel at the Royal Festival Hall
101 years after its premiere in Berlin, Wozzeck remains the epitome of the modern opera. It also remains astonishing: for its musical sophistication as Berg’s score morphs from scene to…
Remarkable Performances from Hurn Court Opera’s La Traviata at Winchester’s Theatre Royal
Hurn Court Opera has come a long way since its creation by founder Lynton Atkinson in 2017. Established to showcase the talents of emerging singers on the threshold of their…