Category: Performances

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, around 1777, the Empress Maria
Theresa used to visit Prince Esterhazy’s summer palace at Esterh‡za,
where there was an opera house fully equipped with stage machinery, leading
singers, an orchestra, and a guy named Joseph Haydn to compose on cue.

Stiffelio was composed just after Luisa Miller — an opera that has had little trouble holding its own in the repertory — and just before the magic trio of Rigoletto, Trovatore and Traviata, the first Verdi operas to take their immediate place on the stages of the world and hold them without a break from that day to this.

Most musical of mourners, weep anew!
Not all to that bright station dared to climb
And happier they their happiness who knew
Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time

Concert performances of operas are often problematic in that the work tends to be cut or otherwise played around with, or the venue is inappropriate – after all, these were meant to be staged pieces.

Elina Garanča conceals her gleaming gold tresses beneath a curly black wig to sing Carmen.

Well into the 1960s, ‘provincial theaters’ were the backbone of Italy’s operatic culture.

David Agler must be feeling a trifle unlucky. Having in 2005 taken over the reins of a flourishing, internationally renowned opera festival, with a stylish new opera house in the planning and the Irish economy booming, his hopes must been high; but in the event the Canadian’s first few years as Artistic Director of the Wexford Festival Opera have been far from plain-sailing.

The roles Richard Strauss composed for his “chorus” of Five Serving Maids in Elektra — all that remains in the opera of the commentator chorus in Sophocles’ tragedy — are short but arduous.

Productions of Giuseppe Verdi’s early opera Ernani have become relatively infrequent primarily because of the difficulties of casting the work requiring four demanding roles.

Exchanging the stage of The Royal Opera House — where he is currently
performing the role of His Highness in Tchaikovsky’s fairy-tale opera,
The Tsarina’s Slippers —