https://www.wexfordopera.com/media/news/incoming-artistic-director-rosetta-cucchi-announces-her-2020-programme
Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus: English National Opera
‘All opera is Orpheus,’ Adorno once declared – although, typically, what he meant by that was rather more complicated than mere quotation would suggest. Perhaps, in some sense, all music in the Western tradition is too – again, so long as we take care, as Harrison Birtwistle always has, never to confuse starkness with over-simplification.
The Marriage of Figaro in San Francisco
San Francisco Opera rolled out the first installment of its new Mozart/DaPonte trilogy, a handsome Nozze, by Canadian director Michael Cavanagh to lively if mixed result.
Puccini’s Le Willis: a fine new recording from Opera Rara
The 23-year-old Giacomo Puccini was still three months from the end of his studies at the Conservatoire in Milan when, in April 1883, he spotted an announcement of a competition for a one-act opera in Il teatro illustrato, a journal was published by Edoardo Sonzogno, the Italian publisher of Bizet’s Carmen.
Little magic in Zauberland at the ROH’s Linbury Theatre
To try to conceive of Schumann’s Dichterliebe as a unified formal entity is to deny the song cycle its essential meaning. For, its formal ambiguities, its disintegrations, its sudden breaks in both textual image and musical sound are the very embodiment of the early Romantic aesthetic of fragmentation.
Donizetti’s Don Pasquale packs a psychological punch at the ROH
Is Donizetti’s Don Pasquale a charming comedy with a satirical punch, or a sharp psychological study of the irresolvable conflicts of human existence?
Chelsea Opera Group perform Verdi’s first comic opera: Un giorno di regno
Until Verdi turned his attention to Shakespeare’s Fat Knight in 1893, Il giorno di regno (A King for a Day), first performed at La Scala in 1840, was the composer’s only comic opera.
Liszt: O lieb! – Lieder and MÈlodie
O Lieb! presents the lieder of Franz Liszt with a distinctive spark from Cyrille Dubois and Tristan RaÎs, from ApartÈ. Though young, Dubois is very highly regarded. His voice has a luminous natural elegance, ideal for the MÈlodie and French operatic repertoire he does so well. With these settings by Franz Liszt, Dubois brings out the refinement and sophistication of Liszt’s approach to song.
A humourless hike to Hades: Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld at ENO
Q. “Is there an art form you don’t relate to?” A. “Opera. It’s a dreadful sound – it just doesn’t sound like the human voice.”
Mark Padmore reflects on Britten’s Death in Venice
“At the start, one knows ‘bits’ of it,” says tenor Mark Padmore, somewhat wryly, when I meet him at the Stage Door of the Royal Opera House where the tenor has just begun rehearsals for David McVicar’s new production of Death in Venice, which in November will return Britten’s opera to the ROH stage for the first time since 1992.