Category: Performances

Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia, his 30^th opera, is based on Victor Hugo’s play of the same name, and had its premiere at La Scala in 1833.

The Plague of Beautiful Sounds: Has Bel Canto gone too far?

There come nights in the opera season where gesamtkunstwerke won’t do — enough of epic masterpieces and supreme lyric outpourings of the human spirit!

My heart didn’t exactly leap in joyful anticipation as I entered the Frankfurt Opera and saw the Arabella pre-set on stage: a big, shallow, white box.

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.