21 May 2009
Lieder and opera are different worlds. But understanding the differences helps us appreciate what makes each form distinct. Hugo Wolf’s songs come close to bridging the genres. They’ve been described as “miniature operas” where dramas are distilled into compact form. »
17 May 2009
Bringing Andrei Şerban’s Turandot to the Washington National Opera as a season finale really means finishing the year with a bang. »
17 May 2009
You won’t get much argument nowadays — you won’t get any from me — if you call Handel’s dramatic oratorios operas in all but name. »
14 May 2009
L’elisir d’amore is perhaps Donizetti’s silliest opera — but also one of his most charming.
»
13 May 2009
In David Alden’s extraordinary new staging of Britten’s
masterpiece, with sets by Paul Steinberg, the Borough is populated by stylised
grotesques, a clever twist on the opera’s existing ‘Little
England’ character stereotypes. »
13 May 2009
The Scottish Play’s ability to conduit bad luck is apparently not limited to the spoken stage, witness the new Paris Opéra production of Verdi’s Macbeth. »
12 May 2009
It’s the Ring — not just an ordinary evening (or four evenings) of opera — indeed, if you accept its creator’s words on the matter, it’s a music-drama, not an opera at all. »
12 May 2009
How often does one experience an opera in which everything works — in which there is not one flaw either in the staging or in its musical dimensions? »
12 May 2009
As far as world premieres go, Houston Grand Opera is in elite company in the United States, having performed thirty-eight new works prior to opening night of André Previn’s new opera Brief Encounter. »
12 May 2009
By sheer coincidence, the Academy of Santa Cecilia — one of the most authoritative symphonic orchestras in Europe — planned a rather unusual concert in the same days (May 3-7) when just in the very same auditorium there was the world première of a movie expected to be a Hollywood blockbuster — the thriller titled “Angels & Demons”. »
12 May 2009
For two years following its premiere Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsesnk was one of the most often performed contemporary operas. »
12 May 2009
Soprano Kate Royal is reported to have said that singing at the Wigmore Hall is “like a religious experience”. »
12 May 2009
Christine Brewer Commands Performance in Last Minute Appearance »
05 May 2009
It’s an odd day in opera when the bad girl wins, but that is only one thing that makes the Opera Atelier production of Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppea remarkable — and admirable. »
03 May 2009
April 29th is Zubin Mehta’s birthday. As a gift to its most beloved musical director, Florence unveiled a new production of Götterdämmerung, a joint Ring Cycle venture with the Valencia Opera started two years ago. »
29 Apr 2009
From the word “go”, the audience feels that this “Maria Stuarda” is quite different from the standard fare offered by Italian theatres. »
29 Apr 2009
I first saw this production in Manchester in 1981: I loved it then and love it now, despite the present hero’s un-Heldentenor qualities when compared to the glorious Peter Hoffman of yore. »
26 Apr 2009
I returned to Don Giovanni firstly because I had never heard Peter Mattei sing, and friends had called him the greatest Don G since Siepi. »
26 Apr 2009
The Recovered Voices series at Los Angeles Opera, in its second season, springs from James Conlon’s fascination and love for the operas of composers whose lives and/or careers came to an end under the Nazi regime. »
26 Apr 2009
Try to imagine the scenario: You’re an opera company, giving concert
performances of neglected, indeed forgotten, hundred-year-old scores (no sets, no costumes, at least you don’t have those headaches), and you give young singers a chance to do their stuff once a year before a paying New York crowd actually eager to hear music they do not know, and you’ve lit on a genuine obscurity, even in the ranks of the obscure; Mascagni’s penultimate stage work, a huge success at the premiere (as his operas usually were), utterly forgotten nowadays (as, but for Cavalleria Rusticana and, on rare occasion, L’Amico Fritz, they pretty much are), and it’s never been performed in North America ever. »
24 Apr 2009
The Teatro Lirico di Cagliari is a sparkling comparatively new building in what used to be a blighted area near to the city center. »
22 Apr 2009
The Bavarian State Opera’s new production of Leos Janacek’s Jenufa is a feather in the cap of intendant Nikolaus Bachler. »
19 Apr 2009
In its new production of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) Lyric Opera of Chicago has achieved a fusion of eighteenth-century sensibilities with a modern adaptation of traditional dramatic and stage techniques. »
19 Apr 2009
Perhaps I’d better just describe what I experienced, Captain. »
19 Apr 2009
The Los Angeles Opera audiences seem to have decided that no matter how they may really feel about Achim Freyer’s “performance art” staging of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, the singers and musicians are giving them at long last a chance to hear these monumental works at the Dorothy Chandler. »
19 Apr 2009
Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s music drama Die tote Stadt has had a rather erratic life in major opera houses. »
19 Apr 2009
On a stormy evening in Houston (both in and outside of the house), Houston Grand Opera’s opening night production of Verdi’s Rigoletto went off with a thunderous bang. »
19 Apr 2009
Schubert’s music ‘suggests a rippling movement and by the side of the rippling a flowering: it has the variety and unsurprising naturalness of moving water and springing herb’ (Capell) and this same naturalness and sense of flowing ease are the very qualities which make John Mark Ainsley such a special interpreter of this composer. »
19 Apr 2009
Rome’s opera house was built in 1880, in the explosion of building that followed the unification of Italy with Rome as its capital. »
10 Apr 2009
Rigoletto is the ideal first opera: a taut tale, comprehensible characters, terrific tunes, and not an ounce of fat anywhere. »
10 Apr 2009
Was Tony Kushner’s monumental play Angels in America in need of being musicalized? »
07 Apr 2009
The current revival of Cav and Pag at the Met went off like clockwork, with all the comfort and reliability that implies for a repertory house and all the success these tried and true verismo stalwarts merit. »
07 Apr 2009
London: Sue Loder reviews Alessandro and the Handel Singing Final »
06 Apr 2009
I cursed myself for not having turned on the television sooner. »
02 Apr 2009
William Kentridge is a South African artist who works in charcoal and eraser (smudges) on paper, in small animated film and video segments (black and white), in theater, and now in opera. Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses was his first operatic project that took place in 1998 in collaboration with South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Theater. »
01 Apr 2009
In the current weak economy many an opera company has retrenched its programming to present primarily the most popular operas. »
01 Apr 2009
If combining the anniversaries of both Purcell and Handel in one production at the Royal Opera was something of a master-stroke, then getting the Royal Ballet in on the act must have seemed to be verging on the brilliant from a commercial point of view. »
30 Mar 2009
Mention Macbeth — The Opera and most think of Verdi. Ernest Bloch took on the subject more than half a century later, in Paris in 1910, when Verdi’s version was almost as obscure as Bloch’s is today. »
30 Mar 2009
Many works by Martinů will be performed in this year’s commemoration of the anniversary of his death, but it would be hard to equal the impact of this performance. Much of its success was due to Kožená, whose presence illuminated the whole opera, even though her moments on stage were fleeting. »
27 Mar 2009
In the world of opera it’s now the director who is the top banana. »
25 Mar 2009
Janáček enthusiasts in London have been spoiled this month: opening the day before English Touring Opera’s Katya Kabanova, David Alden’s staging of Jenůfa made a welcome return to the Coliseum following its original double Olivier Award-winning run in 2006. »
25 Mar 2009
I had been looking forward to it for weeks — really, for years. »
25 Mar 2009
In 1831, when Vincenzo Bellini composed this pastorale full of characters who never express any but sincere emotions (with the exception of Lisa, the calculating flirt), he certainly intended them, and their feelings, and therefore their story, to be taken seriously – or he would not have given them such seriously lovely music. »
25 Mar 2009
For nearly a decade after its premiere, in 1853, Il Trovatore was the most popular opera, perhaps the most popular stage work on the planet — even more than Rigoletto or Ernani, and far more than Traviata, which had its premiere the following autumn. »
24 Mar 2009
Schubert was desperate to be an opera composer — or so one might surmise from the many (at least 18) attempts he made to make a name for himself as a man of the theatre. »
24 Mar 2009
English Touring Opera is 30 years old this year, and has never been more adventurous. »