This famed murderess worked her magic on Toulouse’s ThÈ‚tre du Capitole stage, six dead including her beloved long lost son. It was Victor Hugo’s carefully crafted 1833 thriller recrafted by Italian librettist Felice Romano that became Donizetti’s fragile Lucrezia Borgia.
Amanda Majeski makes a stunning debut at Covent Garden in Richard Jones’s new production of K·t’a Kabanov·
How important is ‘context’, in opera? Or, ‘symbol’? How does one balance the realism of a broad social milieu with the expressionistic intensity of an individual’s psychological torment and fracture?
Returning to heaven: The Cardinall’s Musick at Wigmore Hall
The Cardinall’s Musick invited us for a second time to join them in ‘the company of heaven’ at Wigmore Hall, in a recital that was framed by musical devotions to St Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary.
Diana Damrau’s Richard Strauss Residency at the Barbican: The first two concerts
Listening to these two concerts – largely devoted to the music of Richard Strauss, and given by the soprano Diana Damrau, and the superlative Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in the second – I was reminded of Wilhelm Furtw‰ngler’s observation that German music would be unthinkable without him.
De la Maison des Morts in Lyon
The obsessive Russian Dostoevsky’s novel cruelly objectified into music by Czech composer Leos Janacek brutalized into action by Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski beatified by Argentine conductor Alejo PÈrez.
A First-Ever Recording: Benjamin Godard’s 1890 Opera on Dante and Beatrice
The composer Benjamin Godard (1849–95) is today largely unknown to most music lovers. Specialist collectors, though, have been enjoying his songs (described as “imaginative and delightful” by Robert Moore in American Record Guide), his Concerto Romantique for violin (either in its entirety or just the dancelike Canzonetta, which David Oistrakh recorded winningly decades ago), and some substantial chamber and orchestral works that have received first recordings in recent years.
La Nuova Musica perform Handel’s Alcina at St John’s Smith Square
There was a full house at St John’s Smith Square for La Nuova Musica’s presentation of Handel’s Alcina.
Ermonela Jaho is an emotively powerful Violetta in ROH’s La traviata
Perhaps it was the ‘Blue Monday’ effect, but the first Act of this revival of Richard Eyre’s 1994 production of La Traviata seemed strangely ‘consumptive’, its energy dissipating, its ‘breathing’ rather laboured.
Garsington Opera’s 30th anniversary season: four new productions including an Offenbach premiere
Garsington Opera’s 30th anniversary season will feature four new productions – the UK stage premiere of Offenbach’s Fantasio, Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and finally Britten’s The Turn of the Screw.
Glyndebourne celebrates 25 years of its award-winning opera house in 2019
Unveiled in 1994, the new auditorium increased capacity by 50% to 1,200 seats and significantly improved backstage facilities. This allowed more people to enjoy world-class opera at Glyndebourne and enabled the company to stage bigger and more ambitious productions in the years that followed.