By the time he emerged from retirement with Otello, his
twenty-seventh opera, at 73, there wasn’t much Giuseppe Verdi
didn’t know about how to make an orchestra do his bidding, set the mood
of each line of a good story, piling excitement on excitement and letting the
tension mutate to something gentler at the right times in order to make the
outburst to follow the more demoniac.
Category: Performances
Otello, Carnegie Hall
A Dinner Engagement
Trust Winnipeg’s resourceful Little Opera Company to come up with a little known, yet charmingly entertaining spring production.
Handel’s Hercules when the Music is Paramount
In Lyric Opera of Chicago’s new production of Handel’s
Hercules there is an undeniable interpretive strategy which prompts
the viewer to consider recurring elements of human emotion, e.g. jealousy,
rage, pity, among others.
Americans define new territory for songs
They all wrote songs — lots of them: Ives, Bernstein, Rorem. In recital, however, the American product has never found a place on the perch claimed by Schubert and Schumann.
Ian Bostridge, Wigmore Hall
The most remarkable aspects of this fresh, illuminating performance of
Schubert’s Winterreise by Ian Bostridge and Mitsuko Uchida were the masterly control of dramatic form and the insightful, quite original, shaping of emotional content.
Akhmatova in Paris
The very name Mantovani strikes musical terror in the hearts of high minded Americans and Brits of a certain age. Now the same surname is evidently terrorizing Parisians.
The Tsar’s Bride, Royal Opera House
In Russian-speaking countries, Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride is much loved. In the west, it’s known mainly for its Overture. The Royal Opera House’s production is the first major production of the full opera in Britain.
Katarina KarnÈus, Wigmore Hall
In Britain, Katarina KarnÈus is closely associated with Grieg and Sibelius. Indeed, her career has almost been defined by her recordings of their songs for Hyperion.
Dallas Boris a monument to Tarkovsky
In those dark days before VCR and DVD, knowledgeable film buffs craved the
return of Solaris and Stalker to a local art house screen.
Cyrano, Florida Grand Opera
To enter into David DiChiera’s space as he talks opera shop is to risk
being pulled into his world, rapt by a tractor beam emitting a constant flow of
music theater load.