The opening tableau of Penny Woolcock’s new production depicts deep waters with rays of sun hitting the surface; in the murky blue depths, three harnessed acrobats glide down to the sea bed and back up again.
Category: Performances
Festive Concert with Jessye Norman
It was more the ruins than the remnants of a once-great voice that Jessye Norman brought to Israel’s new, 6500-seat outdoor opera theater at the foot of historic Masada Mountain.
Nabucco at Masada
Israel Opera Nabucco includes three Va pensiero’s It’s apocrypha, of course, but legend has it that since its 1843 premiere at La Scala audiences have wanted an encore of the chorus Va pensiero when Verdi’s Nabucco is on stage.
Le Nozze di Figaro, Royal Opera House
Detailed and precise, but never fussy, David McVicar’s thought-provoking production of Le Nozze di Figaro is ‘busy’ from the opening rushing semi-quavers of the overture.
I Gioielli della Madonna, New York
Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, son of an Italian mother and a German father, was born
in Venice but acclaimed only when he took his operas to Germany, where he
became quite popular during the first decades of the twentieth century.
Bliss, Tosca and La Sonnambula at Opera Australia
Opera Australia regularly commission new work. Usually serious subjects
drawn from notable Australian literature or dealing with an event or hero from
Australian history.
La Damnation de Faust in Modern Guise at Lyric Opera of Chicago
During its recently concluded season Lyric Opera of Chicago presented two
musical pieces based on the theme of “Faust.”
First Opera in 3D — Carmen, Royal Opera House
Everyone knows the tunes from Bizet’s Carmen even if they don’t know it’s an opera. Now the Royal Opera House, London, is making the world’s best known opera into the world’s first 3D opera film.
Tosca, ENO
Seeing Tosca at the Coliseum brings back happy memories, as it was a
performance of Tosca (in a revival of the Keith Warner production in the 1990s) which occasioned my very first trip to the ENO. That also happens to have been
the first time I ever saw Tosca.
Bostridge and Pappano at Wigmore Hall
Bringing their recent recording of Schubert’s late songs to the concert stage, Ian Bostridge and Antonio Pappano swept through a sequence which ranged from bitter-sweet regret to angry self-reproach, from hesitant hope to turbulent despair, in this the second of two performances at the Wigmore Hall.