Say “La Piet‡” and you think immediately of Michelangelo’s Rome Piet‡. Just now Roman Oscar-winning film composer Nicola Piovani has asked us to contemplate two additional Piet‡’s in Rome, a mother whose son is dead by overdose, and a mother whose son starved to death.
Tag: Milenski
Orfeo ed Euridice in Rome
No wrecked motorcycle (director Harry Kupfer’s 1987 Berlin Orfeo), no wrecked Citroen and black hearse (David Alagna’s 2008 Montpellier OrfÈe [yes! tenorissimo Roberto Alagna was the OrfÈe]), no famed ballet company (the Joffrey Ballet) starring in L.A. Opera’s 2018 Orpheus and Eurydice).
Tosca at the Met
?The 1917 Met Tosca production hung around for 50 years, bested by the 1925 San Francisco Opera production that lived to the ripe old age of 92.† The current Met production is just 2 years old but has the feel of something that can live forever.
Samson et Dalila at the Met
?It was the final performance of the premiere season of Darko Tresnjak’s production of Camille Saint-SaÎns’ Samson et Dalila. Four tenors later.†
The Enchantresse and Dido and Aeneas
in Lyon
Dido and Aeneas, Il ritorno d’Ulisse and Tchaikowsky’s L’Enchantresse, the three operas of the OpÈra de Lyon’s annual late March festival all tease destiny. But far more striking than the thematic relationship that motivates this 2019 festival is the derivation of these three productions from the world of hyper-refined theater, far flung hyper-refined theater.
The Outcast in Hamburg
It is a “a musicstallation-theater with video” that had its world premiere at the Mannheim Opera in 2012, revived just now in a new version by Vienna’s ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wein for one performance at the Vienna Konzerthaus and one performance in Hamburg’s magnificent Elbphilharmonie (above). Olga Neuwirth’s The Outcast and this rich city are imperfect bedfellows!
Faust in Marseille
We sat, bewildered, all of us, watching (enduring) Gounod’s sweet little tear jerker as a nasty drug trip. Except for the Australian Marguerite it was an all French cast and they all gamely played along, the sophisticated verse of Offenbach’s librettists Jules Barbier and Michel CarrÈ clearly sailing out over an abrasive pit.
LucrËce Borgia in Toulouse
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.
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.