The Festival International de Film d’Opéra à Entrecasteaux (a tiny village in Provence not far from the A8 autoroute connecting Nice and Marseille). The second edition of this unique summer…
Unalloyed delight: Handel’s Acis and Galatea at Holland Park
This seems to be quite the year for Opera Holland Park: A revelatory Puccini Edgar, a powerful coupling of Wolf-Ferrari (Il segreto di Susanna) and Leoncavallo (Pagliacci), and now the…
DMMO: Best. Barber. Ever.
From the dancing light show during the sprightly overture to the closing precision of the flamenco-disco ensemble moves and every moment in between, Des Moines Metro Opera’s The Barber of…
Des Moines: Apollo’s Bare Body and Bared Souls
Des Moines Metro Opera’s World Premiere of Damien Geter and Lila Palmer’s American Apollo could hardly have been more of an “occasion.” This intriguing musical exploration of the artistic and…
Iowa’s Star-Powered Strauss
Salome is a big, big sing and happily, Des Moines Metro Opera has engaged a big, big star. “Dazzling” is too puny an adjective to describe Sara Gartland for her…
Samson at the Aix Festival
Rameau’s Samson, with the libretto by François-Marie Arouet aka Voltaire, or rather a sort of Rameau/Voltaire Samson imagined by French early music conductor Raphaél Pichon and German stage director Otto Guth,…
Des Moines’ Pelléas à la perfection
Well, well, well, Des Moines Metro Opera has done it again. With their unerringly imaginative and evocative staging of Claude Debussy’s hauntingly lovely masterpiece Pelléas et Mélisande, they have made…
Songs and Fragments at the Aix Festival
That’s Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) by Peter Maxwell Davies and Kafka-Fragmente (1987) by György Kurtág, an inspired pairing by Pierre Audi, the artistic director of the Aix…
Idomeneo, rè di Creta in Munich
Take a stroll around central Munich and you may come upon a plaque on Altenhofstrasse indicating the spot where Mozart lived in the winter of 1780-81 whilst at work on…
Le grand macabre in Munich
The Fourth of July has obvious political meaning in the United States. This year, it also offered the date of the long-awaited British General Election: a curious event, strangely without…