A new production of Richard Strauss’s Salomé is playing at Paris’s Opera Bastille. Stage Director Lydia Steier, an American working mostly in Germany, has designed it to shock audiences. In…
Tristan und Isolde at Seattle
Seattle Opera has long championed the operas of Richard Wagner. Legendary impresarios Glynn Ross and Speight Jenkins – the latter, at 85, still cutting a dapper figure in the audience…
Halévy’s La tempesta opens the 71st Wexford Festival Opera
“Be not afeard,” Caliban reassures the comic conspirators, Stephano and Trinculo, “This isle is full of noises,/ Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.” Indeed, the whole…
The English National Opera announces departure of Stuart Murphy, CEO, in September 2023
The English National Opera (ENO) today announces that Stuart Murphy, current Chief Executive of the ENO and London Coliseum, will leave the company in September 2023. His five year contract…
Dialogues des Carmelites in San Francisco
Poulenc’s masterpiece (1957), Camus’ La Chute (The Fall) Nobel Prize for Literature (1957), Bernstein’s West Side Story (1957), Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954). San Francisco Opera…
Patricia Petibon blurs musical and theatrical boundaries at Oxford Lieder
Back in August, when I spoke to Sholto Kynoch about this year’s Oxford Lieder Festival, he told me that one of the things he was most looking forward to, as…
Mid Wales Opera triumphs with Puss in Boots
Mid Wales Opera has virtually created an instruction manual for the performance of community-based opera in rural areas, shrink-wrapping works into spaces that rarely enjoy professional presentation. Its month-long SmallStages…
Revisiting familar forms and formats at Oxford Leider
If regular concertgoers thought that they knew what to expect from a lute-song recital or a lieder programme, the second evening of this year’s Oxford Lieder Festival would certainly have…
The Voice of Black Opera Competition
Twelve international singers are bound for Birmingham to compete for cash prizes and career development opportunities, with five singers advancing to the Grand Final on 5 December Black British Classical…
Danielle de Niese to perform in English National Opera’s UK premiere of It’s a Wonderful Life
This November, ‘opera’s coolest soprano’ (The New York Times Magazine) and Australian-American actress Danielle de Niese makes her ENO operatic debut at the London Coliseum, opening the festive period with…