This summer at Caramoor, Will Crutchfield (not pictured) will conduct two Verdi operas written for the Paris Opéra. Read more »
Richard Wagner told Cosima he first got the idea of composing an opera about Tristan and Isolde while he was conducting Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi starring his muse, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, in the trouser role of Romeo.
Wagner said lots of stuff. Whether this bit was true or not, it was Wagner’s high opinion of Bellini (especially Norma, of course) that kept the man in the repertory outside of Italy through the dark years of verismo and Gesamtkünstwerk. Happily, the two men never met; Wagner would have tried to borrow money and you know how that would have turned out. Read more »
By the time Rossini was 20, he had produced six operas, most of them brief, comic and slight. He admitted to admiring Mozart (not then well known south of the Alps), but the melodies of his early works show more of the influence of Paisiello. There is, however, already something substantially new and Rossinian about the early operas, and by the time he was twenty-one, in 1813, he had made himself famous all over the kingdom of Italy (that is to say, between Naples and the Alps) with the grand opera Tancredi and the comic L’Italiana in Algeri. Read more »
Repertory for “Bel Canto at Caramoor” 2011: H.M.S. Pinafore and Guillaume Tell.
The Post decided to pass on a review of the Caramoor Maria di Rohan (July 24), but the presentation is definitely worth a mention and some discussion, so let’s take it to parterre.
What impressed La Cieca at the Caramoor concert of Semiramide on Friday was not so much the quality of the performance (though that was on a solidly high level) but the magnificence of the work itself. This magnificence stands out now in even greater relief after the comparison with Les Huguenots later in the weekend.
Cher Public