Tag: Milenski

This Laurent Pelly production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare is wily indeed, enriching Handel’s estimation of antiquity’s most famous female with supreme wit. Were it pure Baroque  opera seria these current…

Bellini’s second to last opera, Beatrice di Tenda, was not a success at its 1833 Venice premiere, though subsequent performances are said to have overcome the opera’s macabre horrors through…

That’s L’elisir d’amore, Donizetti’s bel canto gem, dolled up somewhere on the Italian riviera by the same team that set San Francisco Opera’s 2012 Lohengrin in a Soviet era, bookless…

The black man Omar Ibn Said was forcibly brought from sub-Saharan Africa to South Carolina in 1807. He was sold, becoming an indentured person for life (d. 1863). Omar the…

This is the excellent David Alden 2018 production from Covent Garden. Here is how it fared at the War Memorial Opera House. It fit like a glove due to strong…

Is it man pitted against machines, or is it man sacrificed to machine? Or is it mankind sacrificed to machines. Sitting in the War Memorial Opera House for Mason Bates’…

Enrico Caruso said that Trovatore is easy — you just need the four greatest singers in the world. Let us not argue about who these singers may be. Do let…

That’s Festival International Film d’Opéra d’Entrecasteaux (a tiny village in Provence). The two films of this inaugural year were Francesco Rosi’s 1984 Carmen and Luigi Comencini’s 1988 La boheme (lead photo). The surprisingly…

The Arena di Verona has just hosted its 100th year of summer opera. Long ago the Arena had places for 30,000 Romans, now, with one-third of the monumental structure as an…