Category: Performances

A few years ago, a certain major newspaper boasted a music critic who could not bring himself either to take opera seriously or to deny himself the opportunity to review it.

Appearing on Palm Beach Opera’s website video player General Director
Daniel Biaggi points out among the reasons to attend the first show of the
company’s 2010-2011 season, “fantastic artists whose voices will
blow you away.”

In my July 2009 review of the first revival of Moshe Leiser’s and
Patrice Caurier’s 2005 production of Il barbiere di Siviglia I
commented that the directors, aided by conductor, Antonio Pappano, had
reinvigorated this operatic ‘old friend’, injecting freshness and
spontaneity into familiar material.

Arms swinging loosely at his side, a relaxed smile and bright eyes conveying
his confident ease, James Gilchrist’s young wanderer bounded nimbly onto
the stage at the Wigmore Hall, radiating and embodying the fresh
optimism of spring, at the start of this technically assured and dramatically
coherent performance of Schubert’s song cycle, Die schˆne
M¸llerin.

The dust on 65th Street is clearing up and the reviews for the renovated Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts are in — the piazza is being hailed as newly “inviting” by architects and arts critics alike, and rightly so.

Since he first came to notice a few years ago — in Messiah in this very hall, as Creonte at Covent Garden, and as Arsace in Partenope at New York City Opera, to name by a few recently acclaimed performances — many a starry accolade has been heaped upon young Welsh countertenor, Iestyn Davies: “achingly beautiful tone”,“unforgettable focus and poignancy” and “compelling sense of rhetoric” are typical of the bountiful superlatives.

In its production this season of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera
Lyric Opera of Chicago has staged the work in its original locale at the royal
court of Sweden.

At the end of November Los Angeles Opera brought two productions to the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.