Category: Performances

Director Jonathan Miller was there at the curtain call to greet the first night of this latest revival of a production which has now been in ENO’s repertoire for twenty years.

My Valentine’s Day gift came a bit early courtesy of Los Angeles Opera. Of course, it is to be hoped that your own celebration has a happier outcome than that of opera’s most famous Love Couple, “Tristan und Isolde.”

Valentine’s Day may not quite be in the same major holiday league with the Fourth of July or New Year’s Eve, but you wouldn’t have known it from the fireworks emanating from the stage of Portland Opera, in the form of some dazzling Valentine’s night vocalizing in quite a fine production of Handel’s “Rodelinda.”

A sound designer? Isnít that merely a euphemistic upgrade of ìsound engineer?î

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.