The Salzburg Festival’s Felsenreitschule is home to most of its productions of twentieth century opera, just now two Russian operas based on novels by Fyodor Dostoevsky — Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s The…
Glimmerglass: Supremely Stylish La Calisto
High style and ample substance were equally on dazzling display in the new production of Francesco Cavalli’s La Calisto at the Alice Busch Opera Theatre. From the gender bending casting…
Glimmerglass: Impassioned Pagliacci Plus A Surprise
Shortly before the curtain rose on a splendid production of the evergreen favorite, Pagliacci, we were informed that Glimmerglass Music Director Joseph Colaneri was indisposed and would not conduct. That…
Glimmerglass: Elizabeth Cree Killer Production
Producing festival quality opera in these challenging times for the arts can be murder, but Glimmerglass is knocking ‘em dead with its thrilling and fulfilling new production of Elizabeth Cree.…
Glimmerglass: Rollicking Pirates Rock the Stage
Gilbert and Sullivan’s enduring favorite, The Pirates of Penzance, handily captured the hearts of the capacity audience at the Glimmerglass Festival and held them hostage in rapt amusement throughout a…
The Turn of the Screw – a triumph for Waterperry Opera Festival
No better choice could have been conceived for Waterperry Opera’s first foray into a full-length Britten opera than The Turn of the Screw. And no better performance space for its…
Tristan und Isolde in Bayreuth
It is a Tristan well worthy of the Wagner shrine (not all Bayreuth productions are). Icelandic theater director Thorleifur Örn Arnarsson imposed a truly hermetic discussion of love onto the…
Der Fliegende Holländer in Bayreuth
Like all productions by Russian revisionist stage director Dimitri Tcherniakov, the Bayreuth 2021 Dutchman production is fraught with meaning, delving deeply into the contemporary resonances he discovers in nineteenth century…
PROM 27: Towards the celestial region in Saariaho, Mozart and Richard Strauss
Religion has much to answer for, not least in the range of musical inspiration it has delivered over the ages. In the 1960s people were drawn to southern Mexico to…
PROM 23: Bravura performance of Busoni’s Piano Concerto from Benjamin Grosvenor
Those new to Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto might have wondered about his quasi-symphonic concept, a work of Mahlerian proportions that Benjamin Grosvenor considers to be a “kind of operatic symphony,…