The Princeton Festival has adopted a successful and sophisticated operatic
programming strategy, whereby the annual opera alternates between a
standard warhorse and a less known, more challenging work. Last year
Princeton presented Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. This year
the choice is Nixon in China by modern American composer John
Adams, which opened before a nearly full house of appreciative listeners.
The Princeton Festival Presents Nixon in China
Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel at Grange Park Opera
When Engelbert Humperdinck’s sister, Adelheid Wette, wrote the libretto to Hansel and Gretel the idea of a poor family living in a hut near the woods, on the bread-line, would have had an element of realism to it despite the sentimental layers which Wette adds to the tale.
Handel’s Belshazzar at The Grange Festival
What a treat to see members of The Sixteen letting their hair down. This was no strait-laced post-concert knees-up, but a full on, drunken orgy at the court of the most hedonistic ruler in the Old Testament.
Kenshiro Sakairi and the Tokyo Juventus Philharmonic in Mahler’s Eighth
Although some works by a number of composers have had to wait uncommonly lengthy periods of time to receive Japanese premieres – one thinks of both Mozart’s Jupiter and Beethoven’s Fifth (1918), Handel’s Messiah (1929), Wagner’s Parsifal (1967), Berlioz’s RomÈo et Juliette (1966) and even Bruckner’s Eighth (1959, given its premiere by Herbert von Karajan) – Mahler might be considered to have fared somewhat better.
Don Giovanni in Paris
A brutalist Don Giovanni at the Palais Garnier, Belgian set designer Jan Versweyveld installed three huge, a vista raw cement towers that overwhelmed the OpÈra Garnier’s Second Empire opulence. The eight principals faced off in a battle royale instigated by stage director Ivo van Hove. Conductor Philippe Jordan thrust the Mozart score into the depths of expressionistic conflict.
Irish mezzo-soprano Paula Murrihy on Salzburg, Sellars and Singing
For Peter Sellars, Mozart’s Idomeneo is a ‘visionary’ work, a utopian opera centred on a classic struggle between a father and a son written by an angry 25-year-old composer who wanted to show the musical establishment what a new generation could do.
A riveting Rake’s Progress from Snape Maltings at the Aldeburgh Festival
Based on Hogarth’s 18th-century morality tale in eight paintings and with a pithy libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, Stravinsky’s operatic farewell to Neo-classicism charts Tom Rakewell’s ironic ‘progress’ from blissful ignorance to Bedlam.
The Gardeners: a new opera by Robert Hugill
‘When war shall cease this lonely unknown spot,/ Of many a pilgrimage will be the end,/ And flowers will shine in this now barren plot/ And fame upon it through the years descend:/ But many a heart upon each simple cross/ Will hang the grief, the memory of its loss.’
Richard Jones’s Boris Godunov returns to Covent Garden
There are never any real surprises with a Richard Jones production and Covent Garden’s Boris Godunov, first seen in 2016, is typical of Jones’s approach: it’s boxy, it’s ascetic, it’s over-bright, with minimalism turned a touch psychedelic in the visuals.
Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 2020 Ring Cycle
Lyric Opera of Chicago has announced both schedules and cast-lists for is Spring 2020 performances of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Given the series of individual productions already staged by the company since Fall 2016, that pave the way for the complete cycle, Lyric Opera of Chicago’s complete production should affirm the artistic might of the great composer.