Yes, just when you thought Wotan was the only big guy in town San Francisco Symphony (just across a small street from San Francisco Opera), offered three staged performances of the Mussorgsky masterpiece Boris Godunov in direct competition with San Francisco Opera’s three Ring des Nibelungen cycles.
Tag: Milenski
Die Walk¸re in San Francisco
The hero Siegfried in utero, Siegmund dead, Wotan humiliated, Br¸nnhilde asleep, San Francisco’s Ring ripped relentlessly into the shredded emotional lives of its gods and mortals. Conductor Donald Runnicles laid bare Richard Wagner’s score in its most heroic and in its most personal revelations, in their intimacy and in their exploding release.
Das Rheingold in San Francisco
Alberich’s ring forged, the gods moved into Valhalla, Loge’s Bic flicked, Wagner’s cumbersome nineteenth century mythology began unfolding last night here in Bayreuth-by-the-Bay.
Don Carlos in Lyon
Metteur en scËne Christophe HonorÈ placed his 2016 Aix Festival Cosi fan tutte in Ethiopia. Unfortunately his current Lyon Don Carlos enjoys no such equivalent poetic intuition.
Macbeth in Lyon
A revival of the OpÈra de Lyon’s 2012 Occupy Wall St. production of Verdi’s 1865 Macbeth, transforming naive commentary into strange irony, some high art included.
La Walkyrie in Toulouse
The Nicolas Joel 1999 production of Die Walk¸re seen just now in Toulouse well upholds the Airbus city’s fame as Bayreuth-su-Garonne (the river that passes through this quite beautiful, rich city).
William Tell in Palermo
This was the infamous production that was booed to extinction at Covent Garden. Palermo’s Teatro Massimo now owns the production.
The Bandits in Rome
AKA I masnadieri, rare early Verdi, though not as rare as Alzira. In 1847 London’s Her Majesty’s Theatre† commissioned the newly famous Verdi to write this opera for the London debut of Swedish soprano Jenny Lind.
The Chalk Circle in Lyon
Not the 14th century Chinese play nor its 1832 French translation, but a 1931 operatic re-creation by Alexander Zemlinsky of a 1925 German translation by “Klabund,” staged just now in Lyon by French stage director Richard Brunel.