Category: Performances

Most operas are about love, but Tchaikovsky’s ‘’Eugene Onegin” is a special case because the composer took the subject so personally. Tchaikovsky’s own life was tracing the plot of Pushkin’s verse novel, with catastrophic consequences, and the music is full of yearning, passion, pain, and regret.

Three of the greatest composers of art songs — Schubert, Schumann, and Hugo Wolf — also harbored operatic ambitions. All of them wrote operas and set great store by them, but none has ever gained a foothold in the repertory.

Bleak but uproarious, bawdy but singed with hellfire, Mozart’s opera “Don Giovanni” is just as elusive as its title character. Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard identified Don Giovanni with music and desire: “a force, a wind, impatience, passion,” forever ungraspable.

New operas by Russian and Soviet composers once played a prominent part in the repertoire of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater. But nearly 26 years have passed since the theater last produced an operatic world premiere. On Wednesday, the long drought finally ended with the staging of “Rosenthal’s Children,” a work fresh from the pens of St. Petersburg composer Leonid Desyatnikov and writer Vladimir Sorokin.

LA SCALA this past week has been like the Kremlin during the putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev. For days on end, no-one knew who was in charge or what was going on. The only certainty was that the world would never be the same again.

Es wird nicht mehr lange dauern bis zur Forderung, Filmleute generell von Opernbühnen fernzuhalten. Nicht nur wegen der jüngsten Fehlschläge an großen Häusern, bei denen Filmregisseure und Kinoproduzenten mit Neuinszenierungen dilettierten – sogar in der sich charmant bemühenden Stadttheaterprovinz grassiert nun offenbar das cineastische Virus.

Valhalla proved to be a failed paradise for Wotan and his band of doomed gods and goddesses in Wagner’s epic set of four related operas, “The Ring of the Nibelung.’’ But Lyric Opera of Chicago audiences are experiencing the real thing this week as the company opens the first of three weeklong revivals of its production of the “Ring’’ unveiled in the 1990s.

Schlecht war der erste Eindruck. Einen ganzen Akt lang häuften sich nur Probleme, Missverständnisse und verpuffte Pointen. Ein neuer Figaro mit Höhenproblemen, ein Hausdebütant als Graf, der ständig Gefahr lief, über sein Kostüm zu stolpern – und das ganze Ensemble immer wieder ehrlich überrascht von Jun Märkls Tempi und Zäsuren. Dass die Sänger desto besser wirkten, je länger und genauer sie Ponnelles bald 30 Jahre dienende Inszenierung bereits kannten, stellte der Probensituation an der Staatsoper wahrlich kein gutes Zeugnis aus.

Florian Leopold Gassmann must have been a gas. There is nothing funny about his other 21 operas but L’Opera Seria is a scream. Everything is lampooned, from squabbling stage mammas to brainless tenors. We know little about the piece’s 1769 premiere, but the audience at Vienna’s Burgtheater must have hyperventilated.

NEW YORK – Few cosmic mistakes have ever been so glaring: Soprano Aprile Millo, who embodies the traditional operatic values that Philadelphians hold dear, hasn’t sung here in nearly 20 years.