With only four singers and a short-story-like plot Don Pasquale is an ideal chamber opera. That chamber just now was the 3200 seat War Memorial Opera House where this not always charming opera buffa is an infrequent visitor (post WWII twice in the 1980’s after twice in the 40’s).
Tag: Milenski
Dream of the Red Chamber in San Francisco
Globalization finds its way ever more to San Francisco Opera where Italian composer Marco Tutino’s La Ciociara saw the light of day in 2015 and now, 2016, Chinese composer Bright Sheng’s Dream of the Red Chamber has been created.
Andrea ChÈnier at San Francisco Opera
San Francisco Opera makes occasional excursions into the operatic big-time, such just now was Giordano’s blockbuster Andrea ChÈnier, last seen at the War Memorial 23 years ago (1992) and even then after a hiatus of 17 years (1975).
Salzburg encores
A staged piano recital and an opera as a concert.† Pianist Andr·s Schiff accompanied the Salzburg Marionette Theater at the Mozarteum Grosser Saal and Anna Netrebko sang Manon Lescaut at the Grosses Festspielhaus.
Turco in Italia in Pesaro
When more is definitely more, and less would indeed be less. Two of the biggest names in Italian theater art collide in an eponymous theater.
La donna del lago in Pesaro
Each August the bleak and leaky, 12,000 seat Arena Adriatica (home of the famed Pesaro basketball team) magically transforms itself into an improvised opera house that boasts the ultimate in opera chic — exemplary Rossini production standards for its now twelve hundred seats.
Die Liebe der Danae in Salzburg
The tale of a Syrian donkey driver. And, yes, the donkey stole the show! The competition was intense — the Vienna Philharmonic and the Grosses Festspielhaus in full production regalia for starters.
Cosi fan tutte in Salzburg
This Cosi fan tutte concludes the Salzburg Festival’s current Mozart / DaPonte cycle staged by Sven-Eric Bechtolf, the festival’s head of artistic planning.
The Exterminating Angel in Salzburg
Zeitgeist or what? What Luis Bunuel’s 1962 Franco era film El ‡ngel exterminador may mean to composer Thomas AdËs’ 2016 opera The Exterminating Angel.
Nice, July 14, and then . . .
J.S. Bach’s cerebral Art of the Fugue in Aix, Verdi’s massive Requiem in Orange, Ibn al-Muqaffa’ ‘s fable of the camel, jackal, wolf and crow, Sophocles’ blind Oedipus Rex and the Bible’s triumphant Psalm No. 150 in Aix.