Category: Performances

BOSTON, June 17 – For fans and performers of early music, this city is paradise for a week every other June, when the Boston Early Music Festival sets up its combination concert marathon and trade show. The festival offers performances every night between 5 and midnight. The centerpiece is always a lavishly produced Baroque opera – this year’s is Johann Mattheson’s long-lost “Boris Goudenow” – but concerts by imported ensembles and soloists, and by the festival’s period instrument orchestra, are also a strong draw.

El dramaturgo y premio Nobel de Literatura italiano Dario Fo confesó ayer que ha «saqueado» a Rossini y la tradición de la ‘comedia dell’arte’ para hacer la escenografía de la ópera ‘La gazzeta’ del compositor italiano, que el Liceo barcelonés estrenará el próximo día 20. ‘La gazzeta’ narra la historia de don Pomponio, que quiere casar a su hija con el mejor partido. Para ello, inserta un anuncio en el diario en el que hace un elogio ditirámbico. Aunque la obra estaba llamada a tener éxito, la escasa promoción propició, según Fo, que no recibiera el interés del público cuando se estrenó en Nápoles en 1816.

Very attentive readers will have noticed I put “Siviglia” in quotation marks as it refers in this production to the name of an Italian hairdresser’s salon and not to the Spanish city. Director Joosten who always keeps an attentive eye on surtitles and has them changed when the sung lines are contrary to the happenings on the scene nevertheless let a reference to the Spanish Prado slip in.

Irish fairies can be malign spirits, but they’ve done nothing but good for Queen of Puddings Music Theatre. This small Toronto company launched its only production of the season at Harbourfront Centre on Saturday, and a scant hour later had scored its biggest artistic success ever.

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – “Falstaff” might have been Verdi’s last opera; it might have been Verdi’s greatest opera; it is, without doubt, Verdi’s only and most hilariously comic opera.

“What’s a dame like me doing in a dump like this?” It takes a DBE to get away with a line like that in a venue as august as the Wigmore Hall – and this was how Felicity Lott wrapped up a recital marking 30 years of performing here with pianist Graham Johnson. The programme, Fallen Women and Virtuous Wives, is one the pair are currently touring. While its humour found its niche in the Wigmore Hall, how it will play in Luxembourg next week is anyone’s guess.

If Carl Maria von Weber never quite made it into the grand procession of Romantic giants, he left behind an opera of indestructible charm. “Der Freischütz,” which Eve Queler’s Opera Orchestra of New York undertook on Monday night at Carnegie Hall, is first of all a darling of historians – a musicological ground zero for the German musical theater.

With Monserrat Caballé’s sensational concert at the same hall in September 2000, this is the second appearance of a famous Spanish opera singer in Sofia. The advertising campaign that started two months ago brought very good results assembling the la crema y la nata de la sociedad. The Sofia Metropolitan Orchestra conducted by David Himenez performed well in the solos: Rossini’s “La gazza ladra” and the intermezzo of Heronimo Himenez’ zarzuella “La boda de Luis Alonso.” José Carreras chose to partner with the young and promising Bulgarian soprano, Zvetelina Maldzanska, to share his triumph in Sofia.

Theatrical magic and cheerful charm abound in Opera Theatre of St. Louis’ new production of Andre-Ernest-Modeste Gretry’s version of “Beauty and the Beast,” seen Sunday evening in its premiere.

Ahí estaba Angela Gheorghiu, recogiendo la ovación que se llevaba tras cantar el aria Prendi, per me sei libero, de la penúltima escena de L’elisir d’amore. Lo hacía abrazada al tenor Giuseppe Filianoti, a quien consolaba mesándole el pelo. En la escena anterior, Filianoti había cantado Una furtiva lagrima, y lo hizo, ay, con dos espectaculares gallos incluidos.