“Just like the pyrotechnics the heroine of The Firework Maker’s Daughter longs to create, this new opera for children is a delightful, low-tech throwback to a time before CGI took over the world.” [New York Post]
“The most sensuous sounds at the Met this week come from an opera with nary a love duet. In Dialogues des Carmélites—Francis Poulenc’s 1957 melodrama about an order of nuns martyred during the French Revolution—the music’s voluptuous sweetness depicts the sisters’ intense religious faith.” [New York Post]
“In Leos Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen, the heroine is shot and skinned for her fur. A disturbing conclusion, yes, but also a happy ending, as the exultant music of this 1924 fantasy proves: Though one fox dies, her offspring and the rest of nature continue to thrive forever.” [New York Post]
A last minute scheduling conflict at the New York Post (curse you, Tony season!) meant that my planned review of Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny at Manhattan School of Music had to be 86ed.
De Nederlandse Opera’s remarkable 2011 feat of premiering productions of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide and Iphigénie en Tauride on the same day and virtually the same set has been issued on a 2-DVD set by Opus Arte
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s only opera for Rome was written to an existing libretto by the great Pietro Metastasio, L’Olimpiade, which had already been set by Vivaldi the year previously.
Bollywood dance numbers, kung fu fighting, simulated nudity — and rock-solid musical values — added up to a sterling Giulio Cesare at at the Met.
“I’ve lived with mendacity!—Why can’t you live with it? Hell, you got to live with it, there’s nothing else to live with except mendacity, is there?”
Cher Public