Category: Performances

Durant les riches années passées à la tête de la Monnaie de Bruxelles, Bernard Foccroulle aura élargi la palette de la mise en scène d’opéra, en faisant appel à des chorégraphes ou à des plasticiens. Ainsi, l’homme de théâtre et dessinateur, le Sud-Africain William Kentridge, grand inventeur d’images fixes et animées. Si l’alchimie se fait entre l’univers visuel du créateur et l’oeuvre qu’il met en scène, cela peut renouveler la question. Dans le cas contraire, on a l’impression de voir, pour paraphraser Godard, non pas «des images justes», mais «juste des images». C’est ce qui se passe avec La Flûte enchantée vue par Kentridge.

With a voice at once silvery and dark, compact yet ripe with overtones, soprano Soile Isokoski is in increasing demand as a Wagner and Strauss interpreter. New York so far has heard her primarily in Mozart and French opera, most recently as an achingly poignant Rachel in Halévy’s “La Juive” and as Marguerite in the Metropolitan Opera’s glitzy new staging of Gounod’s “Faust.”

Once upon a time, Masked Ball might have made sense. Back in the 1850s, when Giuseppe Verdi wrote it, he based his story on the assassination of Sweden’s King Gustavus III. A despot, cuckold, and philanderer, Gustavus further alienated himself from his subjects by claiming the exclusive right to produce aquavit, and was shot by one Jacob Johan Anckarström at a costume party in 1792.

Beinahe ist die Geschichte zu Ende. Einen Durchlauf wird die Adolf-Dresen-Inszenierung von Wagners “Ring”— Tetralogie in der kommenden Spielzeit noch erleben, dann ist — nach der 25. Aufführung der “Götterdämmerung” — Schluss. Am 2. Dezember 2007 beginnt mit der Premiere der “Walküre” ein neues “Ring”-Projekt, inszeniert von Sven-Eric Bechtolf, dirigiert von Franz Welser-Möst. Dieses wird im Mai 2009 abgeschlossen sein, ziemlich genau ein halbes Jahrhundert nach dem ersten Wiener Nachkriegs — “Ring” Herbert von Karajans.

It’s always sensible to arrive early for a show by Birmingham Opera Company, simply to locate the venue. After a marquee for Fidelio three years ago and an abandoned car workshop for Candide in 2003, the company’s Monteverdi project, running since the beginning of last year, comes to a climax in a disused ice rink.

A plenitude of sweet music was in the air Saturday night at the Civic Opera House. It arrived long before Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Serenade to Music,” its Shakespearean text a paean to “sweet music,’’ that closed the concert by members of the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists.

Operas like “Don Giovanni” or “Die Zauberflöte” today look like repudiations of the formal, almost motionless style that ruled Europe’s musical theater for most of the 18th century. Yet Mozart was surrounded all his life by opera seria, and he wrote four of them, including the early “Idomeneo” and the late “Clemenza di Tito,” which was heard Friday night at the Metropolitan Opera.

Vielleicht ist es das beste, was dem krausen Opernschauerdrama passieren kann: Die Macht des Schicksals konzertant, vom ersten Schuss an, der sich von selbst aus der Pistole löst. Die Oper Frankfurt lässt das Werk in der Fassung von 1869 in der Alten Oper unter Leitung Paolo Carignanis hören und hat damit die Einschätzung Theodor W. Adornos angesichts einer Inszenierung des Stücks 1928 am gleichen Ort noch überboten. Die schicksalswütige Romantik des Forza-Buchs, so der damals 25-jährige Musikkritiker, “sei in sich bereits so welk, dass zu seiner Beurteilung Marionettendramaturgie allein zuständig wäre”.

The power of the very greatest conductors to reinvent whatever they conduct is one of music’s great mysteries. Claudio Abbado’s conducting is not the only reason to catch the production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte being toured in Italy and Germany by the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, but it is by a very long way the most important. Abbado’s performance is, quite simply, mesmerising. It is so full of musical insight and operatic experience that every bar seems perfectly placed, every detail of the scoring perfectly illuminated.

Bring a hankie, the Florentine just opened “La Bohème.”
Puccini’s opera, which combines likable characters, elements of verismo realism, poignantly beautiful music and a tragic tale of young love lost, is one of the world’s best-loved operas. The Florentine Opera opened a strong production of the classic on Friday, in which director Lillian Groag found a balance between the story’s humor and pathos.