Is Guy Joosten’s staging of RomÈo et Juliette the
best-looking production in the Met’s current repertory or what?
Category: Performances
RomÈo et Juliette, New York
Magnificent Mahler by Shanghai Symphony
It was, of course, only a coincidence, but a week of ideal spring weather — no rain and low humidity — found Shanghai in a perfect mood for an all-Mahler program by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra on March 12.
The Queen of Spades, New York
Tchaikovsky’s Pikovaia Dama (The Queen of Spades) is the longest Mad Scene in opera. Ghermann is already half nuts when we meet him in the park in St. Petersburg on a windy day, and he gets crazier from scene to scene.
Aida, London
Strict courtly hierarchies and the repressed formality of ritual juxtaposed
with violent sexual jealousy and lurid erotic excess … a stage-world
more suited to the Straussian insalubrity of SalomÈ than to the epic
grandeur of Verdi’s Aida, perhaps?
Lucia, New York
It costs a lot to look cheap. And it takes a village to raise a child. In
the case of the Metropolitan Opera’s current revival of Donizetti’s
Lucia di Lammermoor, it takes a lot of talent to produce underwhelming
opera.
La Traviata, Phoenix
Francesco Maria Piave’s Italian libretto for Giuseppe Verdi’s
opera La Traviata is based on the French play La Dame aux
CamÈlias.
Two Troubled Girls in Paris
Commanding soprano performances of put-upon heroines securely anchored two recent evenings at the Bastille Opera House.
Luca Pisaroni at the Wigmore Hall, London
After hearing his stunning Leporello at Glyndebourne and his Figaro at Salzburg, there was no way I was going to miss Luca Pisaroni’s concert with Wolfram Rieger at the Wigmore Hall, London. But I was delighted by how wonderful he sounded close up in recital.
Dialogues des CarmÈlites, Guildhall, London
Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des CarmÈlites is an unusual opera, but much sensitive musical thinking has gone into this production at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London.
L’Africaine, OONY
EugËne Scribe and Giacomo Meyerbeer were in the business of creating
proto-cinematic spectacles of drama and music, the formula being to take a historical incident in some exotic country or era, put in a tormented love story to hold our attention, and resolve the whole in catastrophe.