Category: Performances

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.

On May 22, the Kennedy Center’s Fortas Chamber Music Series and the Chateauville Foundation co-presented a fully staged production of Benjamin Britten’s haunting chamber opera The Turn of the Screw, conducted by Lorin Maazel. Here are three reviews:

Glyndebourne opened this year’s festival with “a new production of Mozartís CosÏ fan tutte, subtitled ëThe school for loversí, will open the 2006 Festival. This masterpiece includes some of Mozartís most exquisite music, and CosÏís now established popularity, following comparative neglect in the 19th century, is partly due to Glyndebourneís championing of the work since the opening of the Festival in 1934.” Here are some initial reviews: