16 Dec 2012
Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt op 23 is rarely heard in full, though the Suites thereon are ubiquitous. At the Barbican Hall in London, Grieg's incidental music for Henrik Ibsen's play was heard complete, enhanced by incidental speech. »
14 Dec 2012
This recital, which focused on a narrowly specific time and place —
1888-1933 Vienna — paradoxically illuminated not only the musical scope and
richness of that epoch but also, as Renée Fleming notes in her prefatory programme article, the extraordinary extent of the diversity, transformation and flux, both historical and cultural, that characterised the era. »
14 Dec 2012
Director David Alden’s confusing production concepts in Verdi’s A
Masked Ball may make you wonder whether you came to the right party »
10 Dec 2012
The live HD simulcast of Mozart’s final operatic effort, set in ancient Rome, reached friends, Romans and countrymen the world over »
09 Dec 2012
Why was Giacomo Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable an overwhelming success in its time ? The Royal Opera House production suggests why: it's a cracking good show! Extreme singing, testing the limits of vocal endurance, and extreme drama. Robert le Diable is Faust, after all, not history, and here its spirit is captured by audacious but well-informed staging. Listen with an open mind and heart and imagine how audiences in Meyerbeer's time might have imagined the madness and magic that is Robert le diable. »
07 Dec 2012
Manitoba Opera launched its celebratory, all-Verdi 40th anniversary season with the Italian master’s Rigoletto that still rattles the soul with its tale of revenge, murder, deceit and heart-wrenching pathos. »
07 Dec 2012
The Nash Ensemble’s final contribution to the Wigmore Hall’s Britten centenary series, ‘Before Life and After’, presented works for soloists and strings. »
06 Dec 2012
‘Canticle’ is the term Britten used to denote an extended setting of a text of spiritual substance. »
05 Dec 2012
They say that there’s nothing worse than a musically-obtuse staging of any opera to put a rookie opera-goer off a composer (or even opera itself) for life. »
29 Nov 2012
Vladimir Jurowski said all the right things during a brief address at the opening of the concert. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony should not be regarded as the climax of the performance, but as the fifth movement in a single work, whose theme was human suffering and the strength of the human spirit, never quashed by the former. »
28 Nov 2012
A beautiful, blingless Butterfly. How else to describe the pleasures of four glorious voices singing Puccini’s heart breaking, passionate melodies without igniting romantic sparks? »
27 Nov 2012
Haydn’s settings of the Mass ought to be heard incessantly, in churches and in the concert hall. »
24 Nov 2012
Drawing on the dark viciousness and bitter malevolence of Prosper Mérimée’s ethnographical novella, Calixto Bieito’s Carmen rejects any notion of flamboyant exoticism and alluring eroticism, and presents us instead with a sordid twilight zone of sexual violence and brutal malice. »
23 Nov 2012
French composer Charles Gounod wrote his five-act opera Roméo et Juliette to a libretto that Jules Barbier and Michel Carré based on William Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. »
23 Nov 2012
Extraordinary diva, Angela Gheorghiu pulled out of opening night after act one. It was news when she made it to the end of the second performance. Here is what happened at the third performance. »
21 Nov 2012
Jeanne D’Arc—Szenen aus dem Leben der Heiligen Johanna, the last stage work of the German composer Walter Braunfels, documents a passage in music history that has only recently begun to break through the surface. »
21 Nov 2012
Wozzeck Wozzeck, Wozzeck: The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Laureate
Conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, now Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor to the London’ Philharmonia Orchestra, is touring the United States with a program that includes three staged performances of Alban Berg’s opera, Wozzeck. »
21 Nov 2012
The Nash Ensemble's series at the Wigmore Hall, "Dreamer of Dreams" continued its survey of British music in the first half of the 20th century with an intriguing programme. Many underlying themes, and thoughtful juxtapositions. »
18 Nov 2012
Who is Patricia Racette? Sexually ripe Nedda, maternal Cio-Cio-San, neurotic Sister Angelica? But now the jealous Tosca? And without question Mme. Racette has again proven herself the Puccini heroine par excellence of this moment. »
16 Nov 2012
Operatic train wreck in San Francisco, hopes crushed for 3000 opera-goers, impresario’s grand scheme derailed. »
16 Nov 2012
One of the main reasons for interest in the Royal Opera’s latest revival of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore was that tenor Roberto Alagna had chosen to return to the role of Nemorino. Though he had sung Nemorino earlier in his career, he had never sung the role at Covent Garden. The other cast members were of a high order too, with Alexandra Kurzak as Adina, Ambrogio Maestri as Dulcamara and Fabio Capitanucci as Belcore. So plenty of reasons for seeing the revival, which I caught on opening night 13 November 2012.
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16 Nov 2012
The Wigmore Hall Celebration of Mendelssohn Song series culminated in a recital of works by Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn and by Robert and Clara Schumann. The programme was very well chosen because Felix, Fanny, Robert and Clara knew each other.. »
14 Nov 2012
At this famous bastion of intellect the biggest drama was the parking. Though the football stadium may have been stuffed, Zellerbach Hall was not. »
13 Nov 2012
In its current production of Simon Boccanegra Lyric Opera of Chicago draws on vocal strengths as well as musical and stage direction that do honor to Giuseppe Verdi’s masterpiece of political and emotional intrigue in fourteenth-century Genoa. »
10 Nov 2012
Wexford Opera’s 2012 trio of rarities, seen on the opening three nights of the Festival, spanned a mere twenty years but offered operatic idioms ranging from verismo to pantomime, operetta to Wagnerian love-death apotheosis. »
10 Nov 2012
Italo Montemezzi’s great “lost” epic opera, La Nave, was heard on 31 October for the first time since 1938, leaving an enthusiastic New York audience wondering why on earth it had been neglected for so long. »
10 Nov 2012
Marking Oliver Knussen’s sixtieth birthday came a BBC Total Immersion
weekend at the Barbican: a double-bill of Knussen’s two operas written in
collaboration with Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are and
Higgledy Piggledy Pop! on Saturday, followed by a day of two chamber
concerts, a film, and an orchestral concert conducted by the composer himself
on Sunday. »
10 Nov 2012
After a slow, long period of gestation, commencing with a short dramatization at Reigate Priory in 1906 and spanning more than 40 years, the first performance of Vaughan Williams’ The Pilgrim’s Progress took place at Covent Garden on 26 April 1951, as part of the Festival of Britain. »
01 Nov 2012
An intriguing blend of old and new marked the tenth anniversary of the
British vocal group, Exaudi, juxtaposing the adventurous intricacies and
affectations of the late-sixteenth century with the virtuosic refinements of
today’s avant garde. »
28 Oct 2012
Every major opera company needs a production of La bohème. It is one of the operas which has the potential to attract everyone, the work which will tempt the occasional opera goer into the theatre. »
27 Oct 2012
The opening images of Richard Strauss’s Elektra in its new production at Lyric Opera of Chicago establish a tension persisting until the final chords of the score indeed signal a resolution of this familial tragedy. »
27 Oct 2012
Netherlands Opera is surely to be numbered among the world’s most adventurous international companies. »
27 Oct 2012
Exquisite pianissimos, sumptuous climaxes, gigantic fortes, insistent horns, sugary winds, tremulous brass, blasting trumpets, whispering strings, pulsating oboes, more gigantic fortes, even more sumptuous climaxes. »
24 Oct 2012
Parsifal, with its heavy dose of religiosity and strains of racial supremacy, remains at once the most mystical and historically burdened of Wagners operas. »
23 Oct 2012
Some especially puerile, needlessly irritating, marketing, involving
pictures of condom packets oddly chosen in so many ways, since few
people find contraceptive especially erotic, and Don Giovanni would seem an
unlikely candidate to have employed them had attended the run-up to this
revival of Rufus Norriss production of Don Giovanni. »
21 Oct 2012
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Mozart and Salieri (1897) received its first ever performance at the Royal Opera House as the highlight of Meet The Young Artists Week at the Linbury Studio Theatre.
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20 Oct 2012
An opera called Where the Wild Things Are based on a libretto by Maurice Sendak may sound like a mere treat for children, but when paired with the music of Oliver Knussen, as performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in a new and unique production by Netia Jones, it makes for a forty minute joy ride into fantasy land for adults as well. »
19 Oct 2012
The role of Lucia in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor was written for Fanny Tacchinardi Persiani who lived from 1812 to 1867. »
18 Oct 2012
The first of four concerts in Jonathan Biss’s ‘Schumann: Under the influence’ series at the Wigmore Hall was a focused, intelligent and, at times, sensuous and illuminating, evening of music-making. »
17 Oct 2012
Labelled a “parable of oppression” by the late musicologist, Philip Brett, Britten’s provincial comedy, Albert Herring, is a tough nut to crack. »
12 Oct 2012
Frankfurt Opera’s adventurous season had a notable beginning with a luminous staging of Samuel Barber’s seldom heard Vanessa. »
12 Oct 2012
Forget Herman Melville, forget struggling with deep human complexities. At least those that possessed nineteenth century Americans. »
10 Oct 2012
Lucky Angeleno opera lovers! In anticipation of the Giuseppe Verdi’s bicentennial (it will occur in 2013) Los Angeles Opera treated its patrons to a unique and musically thrilling performance of I Due Foscari, the sixth of the composer’s twenty-six operas. »
10 Oct 2012
‘The last-ever performances of Nicholas Hytner’s production of The Magic Flute,’ claims the programme. »