Category: Performances

Handel operas are like London buses — you wait for ages and then 3 come along together.

Ferrucio Furlanetto apparently loves the temperate climes of San Diego in California’s equivalent of late winter.

Superlatives were in short supply when the curtain fell on Tristan und Isolde at Chicago Lyric Opera on January 27.

‘Back by popular demand’ claimed ENO’s publicity material for the
21-year-old production which had its supposed swan-song last season – though it remains questionable whether the company ever really intended to get rid of it.

Die tote Stadt is Korngold’s masterpiece in the old sense of the word, when a craftsman would produce a dazzling work to show the world what he could do. This is Korngold’s manifesto, so to speak.

Pushkin’s poem Eugene Onegin is the first of the great line of Russian novels, passionately loved by all the literate of that most literary nation.

One definition of “poach” is “to take or appropriate something unfairly.”

ThÈ‚tre Royal de la Monnaie / De Munt started 2009 by serving up a real New Year’s treat for the Belgian capital’s opera enthusiasts: a near-perfect staging of Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice.

The Greek princes Arsace (alto) and Armindo (alto) are seeking handsome Queen Partenope (soprano), who has just founded the city of Naples, in marriage.

I had never personally imagined mythical Hercules as a WWF Wrestler-cum-Caveman but damn if Dutch National Opera’s staging of Francesco Cavalli’s Ercole Amante didn’t almost persuade me it could be so.