review / performance
I had been hopeful that 2024 would end, if not on a high note, then one that was at least in tune.
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What can you say, other than that everything was fab?
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There are two problems to address – problems of the sort the arts thrive on addressing.
While the Met’s Mozart-lite holiday production of The Magic Flute kept the eyes entertained with spectacular sets and costumes, the scattershot casting and lack of musical seriousness dragged down this opera for beginners.
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If song recitals by opera stars Piotr Beczala and Asmik Grigorian sometimes came up short, Semyon Bychkov’s powerful rendition of the Glagolitic Mass instantly became one of the year’s highlights.
Last Thursday evening, pure virtuosity was on display at the Veterans’ Room of the Park Avenue Armory, courtesy of soprano Barbara Hannigan and pianist Bertrand Chamayou.
It was, at least, a jolly good show. Whether or not it actually suited Stravinsky’s music or Auden and Kallman’s text, is another question.
The court of Mantua has run away to join the circus; Washington, DC and Baltimore’s experimental opera company, IN Series, transformed Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto in a new production set under the big top this winter.
Back to Brussels last Sunday for my third new opera of the season (after The Time of our Singing, also at La Monnaie, and Picture a day like this, at the Opéra Comique): Mikael Karlsson’s Fanny and Alexander, with a libretto by Royce Vavrek.
American opera and its institutions are experiencing an identity crisis. Nowhere is this clearer than in Tazewell Thompson and Jeanine Tesori’s Blue.
Here’s the bottom line: at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall stage on December 3, Iestyn Davies and viol consort Fretwork made the sweetest sounds I’ve heard from human beings all year.
On Tuesday night, in the commodious concert hall of the Morgan Library, the Boston Early Music Festival forces brought Georg Philipp Telemann’s Don Quichotte auf der Hochzeit des Comacho to New York.
Washington Concert Opera returned on November 24th for its first show of the 2024-2025 season with a production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, another (relative) rarity from the composer following last year’s season-closing presentation of La rondine.
A recent conversation with a friend who has loved Die Frau ohne Schatten for twice as long as I have been alive revealed that we both had some unresolved questions about the plot.
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