Category: Performances

It’s an odd day in opera when the bad girl wins, but that is only one thing that makes the Opera Atelier production of Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppea remarkable — and admirable.

April 29th is Zubin Mehta’s birthday. As a gift to its most beloved musical director, Florence unveiled a new production of Gˆtterd‰mmerung, a joint Ring Cycle venture with the Valencia Opera started two years ago.

From the word “go”, the audience feels that this “Maria Stuarda” is quite different from the standard fare offered by Italian theatres.

I first saw this production in Manchester in 1981: I loved it then and love it now, despite the present hero’s un-Heldentenor qualities when compared to the glorious Peter Hoffman of yore.

I returned to Don Giovanni firstly because I had never heard Peter Mattei sing, and friends had called him the greatest Don G since Siepi.

The Recovered Voices series at Los Angeles Opera, in its second season, springs from James Conlon’s fascination and love for the operas of composers whose lives and/or careers came to an end under the Nazi regime.

Try to imagine the scenario: You’re an opera company, giving concert
performances of neglected, indeed forgotten, hundred-year-old scores (no sets, no costumes, at least you don’t have those headaches), and you give young singers a chance to do their stuff once a year before a paying New York crowd actually eager to hear music they do not know, and you’ve lit on a genuine obscurity, even in the ranks of the obscure; Mascagni’s penultimate stage work, a huge success at the premiere (as his operas usually were), utterly forgotten nowadays (as, but for Cavalleria Rusticana and, on rare occasion, L’Amico Fritz, they pretty much are), and it’s never been performed in North America ever.

The Teatro Lirico di Cagliari is a sparkling comparatively new building in what used to be a blighted area near to the city center.

The Bavarian State Opera’s new production of Leos Janacek’s Jenufa is a feather in the cap of intendant Nikolaus Bachler.

In its new production of Mozart’s Die Entf¸hrung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) Lyric Opera of Chicago has achieved a fusion of eighteenth-century sensibilities with a modern adaptation of traditional dramatic and stage techniques.