Category: Performances

A husky baritone in Speedos on a motor scooter and a buxom, purple-wigged Dame Edna drag clone ó the Aspen Opera Theater Companyís staging of Francesco Cavalliís 1667 ìEliogabaloî was off to a start that promised to equal the programís over-the-top staging of the composerís 1649 ìGiasoneî two summers ago. (AOTC director Edward Berkeley raised the curtain on that Baroque potboiler to a biker Amor on a Harley.)

The unmistakable fanfare that opens Monteverdiís seminal LíOrfeo rang out from the top of the crowded foyer of the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam last Friday night to signal not only the start of the opera, but also the opening night of their celebratory 2007 Monteverdi Cycle.

Written in 1900, Elgarís Gerontius expresses the universal and existentialist struggle of death and rebirth. The allegorical significance of the piece touches on a need for faith, self-discovery, and acceptance of the world around us.

CENTRAL CITY, Colo. ó A year ago, when the Central City Opera announced plans to conclude its 2007 75th anniversary season with Gian Carlo Menottiís ìSaint of Bleecker Street,î the composer was aged but alive.

Itís clear today that Chinaís Cultural Revolution has led to a cultural revolution that ó in music at least ó has made the countryís artists frontrunners on the international scene.

In an evening brimming with sublime performances, Anja Siljja took grasp of her dramatic prowess and left us breathless, yearning for more. At the most sacred opera house in Italy, and perhaps the world, Jan·?ekís opera was thrillingly presented and is an example of our beloved genre at its finest.

“Who in the world am I?” proclaimed the posters all over Munich, reducing Lewis Carroll’s famous conundrum to a sound-bite.

If you are in need of a Romantic, Alt-Nuernberg, Beloved-Old-Vaterland-As-It-(Never)-Was sort of production of “Die Meistersinger,” you would probably do well to wait for the Met revival, and stay far far away (actually, add another “far” to that) from the Bayreuth Festpiel’s latest “Skandal”-ripe interpretation.

For twenty-eight years now the Ohio Light Opera Festival (OLO) has held forth in Wooster in the summertime, presenting no less than 99 different works (their big 100th comes next year), familiar and forgotten, by the likes of Gilbert and Sullivan, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Offenbach, Sigmund Romberg, Carl Zeller and Emmerich K·lm·n — to refer only to the authors of the seven undertaken this year.