Category: Performances

First performed in 1775, Georg Benda’s Ariadne auf Naxos is a melodrama in the most literal sense of the word — a work for actors and orchestra in which music is deployed to heighten the effect of emotional declamation. Even though posterity has tended to play its influence down, many in the late 18th and early 19th centuries rated it as both a masterpiece and a major vehicle for a tragic actress. This performance revealed it to be a work of considerable power.

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – German writers Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s stylized 1928 masterpiece “The Threepenny Opera” is savagely cynical, sardonic, brittle and worldly wise—and wonderfully well-performed at the Odyssey Theater Ensemble, a tribute to savvy director Ron Sossi and a cast of 16 talented and eager performers.

Benjamin Britten’s opera Curlew River was inspired by the Noh plays he saw on his 1956 visit to Japan, after which he asked his regular librettist, William Plomer, to adapt Sumidagawa for him. Eight years later, the opera was composed. Since it lasts only an hour and requires a highly stylised kind of performance, it has never been a favourite with regular opera houses, but it makes for excellent festival fare. The Edinburgh Festival has mounted its own production, directed by Olivier Py, which is well worth catching.

Mit h-moll in den Untergang. Die Zeit laeuft. Der Tod sitzt bereit. Geteilte Geigen in hoechster Hoehe, triste, abfallende Phrasen. Eine Frau in fuchsrotem Brokat und mit wirrem Haar platzt rueckwaerts in das leere Raumrund. Kruemmt sich, sinkt auf eine Bank, schaut fast erleichtert Freund Hein, einem weisshaarigen Alten, ins Auge. Anna Netrebko ist da. Violetta auch. Es kann losgehen. Die Salzburger “Traviata” hat seit zwei Minuten endlich begonnen.

Like Glyndebourne, Aix treats Mozart and Rossini as “house” composers, but Rossini has traditionally taken second place. This summer, in Provence as much as in Sussex, Rossini comes off better. After its two disappointing Mozart productions in the Théâtre de l’Archevèche at the weekend, the Aix festival decamped to the gardens of a dilapidated but enchanted estate outside the town for an evening of pure joy, courtesy of a new Barber.

Central City – Perhaps because of its home in a small, historic mining town far from the two coasts, Central City Opera has long championed American opera.

There is one splendid reason to see Gaetano Donizetti’s “Lucie de Lammermoor” at Glimmerglass Opera this season, and her name is Sarah Coburn.

I can only dimly imagine how this singular and arresting production was first greeted at Covent Garden back in 1991. To this newcomer’s eye it is still both amazingly original in its design and concept, and yet also oddly frustrating. Essentially, director Graham Vick and designer Paul Brown and their team created a world, half historic, half fantastic, and one is left with a visual memory replete with starkly simple blood-red sets, kaleidoscopically coloured bizarrely shaped costumes and arrowed shafts of silver light, almost painfully reflecting from armoured breastplates. The time is about 65 BC and the world is one of an old Asia Minor versus a rising Rome, with an ageing King Mitridate fighting off both martial and sexual invasions of his territories. The heavy, stylised, costumes — extravagant to the point of caricature — are in themselves a theatrical tool that both enable and yet also constrain the drama of this young Mozart’s early work. If the singers were disadvantaged physically by what they were wearing, they didn’t seem to show it — although to be fair none had to move at anything more than a dignified pace. It was the supporting actors/dancers, Kabuki-like, who supplied the human activity — including a memorable “a capella” rhythmic foot-stamping war-interlude. All other dramatic extremes — be it fevered love declaration, jealous rage or elegant death — was conducted in an almost balletic minimalism of physical effort.