Category: Performances

LONDON ñ the fledgling Independent Opera Company takes on Orlando.

SAN FRANCISCO ó Christine Brewer took her time mastering Isolde before making her stage debut in the role with the San Francisco Opera in October.

The Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, Italy, had as many surprises on the stage inside as the weather had outside.

In his introduction to the Welsh National Opera’s celebratory 60th anniversary season programme Carlo Rizzi, their Music Director, declares that “we are bringing the best of Wales to the rest of the world ó and the best of the world to Wales”.

Carmen and The Magic Flute have finally made it onto my calendar, a nice way to end the summer opera festival at Santa Fe.

The news from Santa Fe Opera last week-end is good, unexpectedly so. The British composer Thomas Ades’ new (2004) opera, a riff on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, has been rumored hard to perform and harder to hear.

Richard Straussí 1905 neurotic shocker Salome has long been a favorite Santa Fe Opera repertory piece, having enjoyed ten productions over the years.

JULES MASSENET’S ‘BROADWAY HIT,’ the 1899 Cendrillon, billed as Cinderella but sung in French, was given top notch treatment at its Santa Fe Opera debut Saturday night (July 15).

On June 9th in Sofia and 16th at the Varna Summer Festival, celebrated soprano Krassimira Stoyanova made her Richard Strauss debut in Vier letzte Lieder in her native Bulgaria.

Returning from Munich’s new production of Handel’s “Orlando” at thirty thousand feet above clouds which might have done service as props for that opera when first staged in 1733, it occurred that the great man himself could have had things to say about what might be director David Alden’s valedictory baroque piece for the Bayerische Staatsoper.