30 Jul 2013
Don Giovanni — the coup de coeur. Elektra — a masterpiece. Rigoletto — a hit and a miss. »
24 Jul 2013
The superstitious would have us believe that it is better not to build up expectations, lest they be confounded. »
23 Jul 2013
This zany production of Verdi’s only comic opera before ‘Falstaff’ keeps the singers in chaos and the audience in stitches »
23 Jul 2013
That’s Helen (of Troy) by Cavalli, so maybe you are interested after all, though the more engaging experience was The House Taken Over by Vasco Mendonça. »
23 Jul 2013
For me, this is almost to have come full circle — though as anyone with even the slightest acquaintance with the Ring will tell you, the so-called ‘cycle’ does not end where it began, its world having been changed forever. »
22 Jul 2013
The final concert in pianist Julius Drake’s Perspectives series united song, literature and biography through the prism of Dominick Argento’s Pulitzer Prize-winning song-cycle, From the Diary of Virginia Woolf. »
20 Jul 2013
The Royal Albert Hall was made for Karl-Heinz Stockhausen. BBC Prom 11 2013 featured Gesang der Jünglinge and Welt-Parliament from Mittwoch from Licht. »
20 Jul 2013
‘Wort oder Ton?’ may be the Countess’s question, but it is far from the only question asked in, let alone by, Capriccio. »
19 Jul 2013
David Pittsinger, as King Arthur, provided most of the magic in this
pleasant but unspectacular production of the Lerner and Loewe musical »
19 Jul 2013
Donizetti’s late comedy Don Pasquale debuted in Paris in 1843 and has been popular ever since. It was produced at the Glyndebourne Festival in 1938 but, rather surprisingly, Mariame Clement’s 2013 production, refreshingly set in the 18th century rather than being update, was the first festival production since 1938. »
19 Jul 2013
This remarkably cohesive programme of works by Britten, Lutoslawski and Adès was underpinned by a dark intensity; tragic realism interwoven with transient intimations of hope. »
17 Jul 2013
There are forces to be reckoned with at l’Opéra de Marseille — a first class orchestra, a first class chorus, first class casts (with notable exception, see below) who inhabit an extraordinarily fine old opera house. »
17 Jul 2013
Pia Furtado’s production of Donizetti’s gentle rom-com, L’elisir d’amore, opens in the greenhouse-laboratory of a sunflower factory — all steel trolleys and agronomic apparatus. »
17 Jul 2013
Excellent staging and strong vocal efforts put wind in the sails of this legendary ghost ship »
13 Jul 2013
Ermonela Jaho caused a sensation at Covent Garden in London five years ago, when she took over Violetta at short notice from Anna Netrebko. »
11 Jul 2013
First performed at this year’s Brighton Festival and originally designed for the Theatre Royal Brighton, this multi-media staging of Benjamin Britten’s five Canticles by long-standing collaborators Neil Bartlett and Paule Constable, also had an outing at Snape Maltings Aldeburgh in May this year, and has now arrived on the austere stage of the Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House. »
10 Jul 2013
Central City Opera’s meticulous staging of Our Town makes as good a case as is likely possible for Ned Rorem’s operatic version of that classic play.
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10 Jul 2013
Since its inception in 2006, the annual community opera at Blackheath Halls has become a favourite fixture in the local summer calendar. »
08 Jul 2013
Poised between ritual and drama, between East and West, between Zen-Buddhist
symbolism and Christian medieval morality play, Britten’s three church parables pose some tricky problems — including a deliberately objectivised framing device which can distance the work from the audience, and, unusually for Britten, some less than effective musico-dramatic pacing. »
08 Jul 2013
‘Tis the season for aerial starbursts, and for my money more than a few rockets could be sent up to laud Des Moines Metro Opera.
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07 Jul 2013
La Rondine isn’t Puccini’s finest moment. As drama it’s a retread of La Bohème. The music resembles out-takes from Madama Butterfly. What holds it together is Magda. »
02 Jul 2013
Glyndebourne revitalizes Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie. Baroque tastes were extravagant. Louis XIV, Le Roi Soleil, and his successor Louis XV, epitomized the aesthetic: audacity, not gentility, vigour, not timidity. »
30 Jun 2013
Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers confirms the composer’s deftness in penning a good tune and spinning a faux-Oriental orchestral fabric. But, opera is more than simply a catchy melody or two, and if it wasn’t for the tenor-baritone friendship duet ‘Au Fond du Temple Saint’, the opera’s one-dimensional characters and dramatic stiltedness would probably see it consigned to the drawer marked ‘lesser-known, justly neglected’. »
29 Jun 2013
Thomas Hampson's first Simon Boccanegra at the Royal Opera House makes this revival of Verdi's great opera worthwhile. It's a role which suits a singer of Hampson's intelligence. »
28 Jun 2013
We’ll never know exactly how Handel’s first opera, Almira, Königin von Castilien, appeared at its 1705 premiere in Hamburg. »
24 Jun 2013
Engelbert Humperdinck and his sister Adelheid Wette rather softened the story when they came to write the opera Hansel und Gretel, though sufficient undercurrents remain to allow a director scope for exploration of the more psychological aspects of the story. »
22 Jun 2013
A glance at the ROH programme which accompanies this new production of Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana reveals a striking number of ‘role débuts’; evidence that, since its Coronation-commissioned revelation in 1953, this opera has had a relatively quiet 60 years - hyperbolically announced as ‘one of the great disasters of operatic history’ at its troubled opening. »
20 Jun 2013
With the world premiere of Champion, the enterprising Opera Theatre of Saint Louis set the bar very high indeed for the summer festival season. »
18 Jun 2013
The Importance of Being Earnest , Gerald Barry’s fifth opera, was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and the Barbican, and was first performed in concert, Thomas Adès conducting the London premiere. »
17 Jun 2013
‘Beauty is the one form of spirituality that we experience through the senses.’ In Thomas Mann’s, Death in Venice, Plato’s axiom stirs the hopes of the aging, intellectually stale poet, Gustav von Aschenbach, that he may rekindle his creativity. »
14 Jun 2013
There is a sense in which it all began in London, Puccini having been seized in 1900 with the idea of an opera on this subject after watching David Belasco’s play here. »
13 Jun 2013
The tenor that the audience most wanted to hear, Plácido Domingo, opened the vocal program with “Junto al puente de la peña” (Next to the rock bridge) from La Canción del Olvido (The song of Oblivion) by José Serrano. He sounded rested and his voice soared majestically over the orchestra. »
12 Jun 2013
Tucked away somewhere in the San Francisco Opera warehouse was an old John Cox production of Così fan tutte from Monte Carlo. Well, not that old by current standards at San Francisco Opera. »
12 Jun 2013
Rossini's Maometto Secondo is a major coup for Garsington Opera at Wormsley, confirming its status as the leading specialist Rossini house in Britain. Maometto Secondo is a masterpiece, yet rarely performed because it's formidably difficult to sing. It's a saga with some of the most intense music Rossini ever wrote, expressing a drama so powerful that one can understand why early audiences needed "happy endings" to water down its impact »
11 Jun 2013
I suppose it was inevitable that, in this Britten Centenary year, the 66th Aldeburgh Festival would open with Peter Grimes. »
10 Jun 2013
Die Entführung aus dem Serail at Garsington Opera at Wormsley isn’t Mozart as you’d expect but it’s true to the spirit of Mozart who loved witty, madcap japes. »
09 Jun 2013
What a pity! On a glorious — well, by recent English standards — summer’s day, there can be few more beautiful English countryside settings
than Glyndebourne, with the added bonus, as alas much of the audience appears
to understand it, of an opera house attached. »
09 Jun 2013
Described by one critic as “cosmically gifted”, during her tragically short career, American mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson amazed and delighted audiences with the spellbinding beauty of her singing and the astonishing honesty of her performances. »
09 Jun 2013
“I wrote it almost without noticing.” So Verdi declared when reminded of his eighth — and perhaps least frequently performed, opera, Alzira. One might say that, since he composed the work, no-one else has much noticed either. »
09 Jun 2013
Just when you thought the protagonist was Hoffmann! Who, rather what stole the show? »
05 Jun 2013
When is verismo verily veristic? Or what is a virginal girl dressed in communion white doing in the two murderous acts of the Los Angeles Opera’s current production of Tosca? And why does she sing the shepherd's song? »
03 Jun 2013
Wagner’s Lohengrin is not an unfamiliar visitor to the UK thanks,
in the main, to Elijah Moshinsky’s perennial production at Covent Garden. »
02 Jun 2013
Philip Glass's The Perfect American at the ENO in London is a visual treat, but the libretto is mind-numbingly anodyne. »
30 May 2013
Jonathan Dove's Mansfield Park, with libretto by his regular collaborator Alasdair Middleton, has the remarkable distinction of being the first completed operatic adaptation of any Jane Austen novel to be staged. »
30 May 2013
London’s two principal opera companies have offered a baffling
near-silence as their response to Wagner’s two-hundredth anniversary. »
30 May 2013
If a recent trio of musically superlative performances at Canadian Opera Company is indicative of their norm, the casting director should get a hefty bonus. »
30 May 2013
Just when you imagine you’ve got the operatic time-line fixed in your mind
in a clean sweep of what goes where and when and how, you hear another work
from another forgotten corner of the repertory that upends one’s conclusions. »
