Category: Performances

An air of anticipation filled the Four Seasons Centre as the announcer walked across the stage to say that soprano Ester S¸megi was ill and would not be performing.

To open its 2008 season, San Diego Opera restored the production of Richard Wagner’s Tannh‰user that G¸nther Schneider-Siemsson created for the Metropolitan Opera three decades ago.

Anthony Minghella’s visually-arresting staging, a co-production with New York’s Metropolitan Opera and the Lithuanian National Opera, returned this month to its original home at the London Coliseum after a gap of two years.

While I eagerly seized upon an opportunity to hear Angelika Kirschlager live for the first time, having written in very recent weeks about not one but two of the star mezzo’s current CD releases, I ventured to Frankfurt’s Alte Oper feeling a little bit like her stalker.

When I worked in the Archives of the Met, I was custodian of several hundred costumes, many from the days when divas traveled with steamer trunks full of things run up just for them, by the finest designers, with the most glamorous materials, in the colors and styles that suited the ladies themselves.

There is nothing redeeming about Sir John Falstaff, one of Shakespeareís most lively comic characters and the subject of Verdiís final opera, and yet, inexplicably, we love him.

What constitutes an “international opera star” these days, anyway?

The Metropolitan Opera audience loves its Wagner, and the management for the last several decades has, alas, made sure we arenít spoiled: itís a rare season that gets more than two production revivals of Wagner, and some years there have been none.

With her performance of the ìFour Last Songs,î ably partnered by Michael Tilson Thomas and his San Francisco Symphony, Deborah Voigt emphatically confirmed her place as one of the glories of the current roster of Strauss interpreters.

John Adams, whose opera Nixon in China set the bar for post-minimalism in the lyric theatre, has once again scored a success with his latest work.