Category: Performances

Enough ink was spilled last year gushing over Valencia’s new Calatrava-designed opera house and Arts and Science park that I had been chomping at the bit for the opportunity to take in a performance there as soon as my availability and, more important, the availability of a still-very-hard-to-find ticket coincided.

Do we too easily take Richard Strauss for granted? The question is prompted by the superlative production of ìFrau ohne Schattenî that was the highlight of the fall season at the Chicago Lyric Opera.

Watching The Queen of Spades staged by a Russian company is often an unforgettable experience.

If Belfast in Northern Ireland isnít a city that immediately springs to mind as a centre of musical excellence then itís not for want of talent, initiative and professionalism within its cultural community.

After the triumph of his fifth opera, Ernani, Verdi could have gone on writing howling melodramas and made a mint.

Not long ago, English National Opera declared an intention to capitalise on its name and history by placing greater emphasis on English works.

Despite 19th-century Russiaís reputation as an Italian opera haven, Verdiís late masterpiece Otello found acceptance there only with great difficulty, even though in its 1889 premiere the title role acquired a great local interpreter in the Mariinsky Theater primo uomo, Nikolai Figner.

Imagine a mild December night, with some three hundred people queueing for a concert ticket on Siena’s horseshoe-shaped Piazza del Campo.

Peter Schickele, channeling P.D.Q. Bach, was wont to say, “Most classical scholars were
unaware Iphigenia was ever in Brooklyn … and I think the cantata, Iphigenia in Brooklyn, does for Iphigenia what the Vinland Map did for Leif Ericsson.”

The American Dream and the tragic vision of ancient Greece are miles and millennia apart; yet they merge seamlessly in William Bolcom’s “View from the Bridge,” on stage in November at the Washington National Opera.