Oops, I did it Onegin
Wolf Trap Opera presented a lovely Eugene Onegin with particularly noteworthy performances by Magdalena Kuźma and Daniel O’Hearn.
Alexander Pushkin
18 pieces since 2010.
18
pieces
17
years
Once I was a schlepper, now I’m Miss Mazeppa
John Danaher on the world-premiere recording of Clémence de Grandval‘s wild and worthy Mazeppa, the latest release from the operatic archaeologists at Palazzetto Bru Zane.
When Pushkin comes to shove
An incoherent production of Ruslan and Lyudmila at the Hamburg State Opera may dispense with the fantastical, but Glinka‘s magic remains.
I’m still thinking about Laurent Pelly’s The Golden Cockerel
In a lifetime of opera going I suppose I have seen many transformative productions, but this recent one seems, in the light of the increasing disaster enfolding this country, uncannily pertinent.
By Belfagor
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Prick and choose
Heartbeat Opera knows how to party.
Rachmaninoff three ways
A troika of operas by Rachmaninoff: Aleko , The Miserly Knight and Francesca da Rimini , courtesy of Odyssey Opera.
Love me or leaf me
Robert Carsen‘s legendary production of Eugene Onegin finally arrives in San Francisco.
Thrust into the political spotlight
The Met’s revival of Turandot on Saturday night was surprisingly contentious.
Skeleton key
Original Director Richard Jones and revival director Benjamin Davis have created a staging that veers wildly between fascinating and fatally flawed.
Turning over an old leaf
Is there any opera that can take more of a beating while still making an impact than Eugene Onegin?
Love me or leaf me
On this day in 1997 Robert Carsen made his Met debut with a new production of Eugene Onegin.
Cock of the walk
Zolotoy pyetushok (translated as The Golden Cockerel in English, is best known in these parts as Le Coq d’Or.
Cuts like a knife
You may wonder what Rachmaninoff’s Aleko and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci have in common.
No business like snow business
Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is his masterwork and its themes of social convention and unrequited longing surely struck a deep chord in a composer who, in late 19th century Russia, was gay and had to conduct himself carefully.
Tonight or Neva
Last night, the Met opened the 2013-14 season with a handsome, fairly conservative new production of Eugene Onegin by Deborah Warner that replaces the handsome, fairly conservative one by Robert Carsen. (The trend is clear.)
She Dodon him wrong
Our Doyenne demonstrated her omniscience once again by sending me a DVD of Rimsky Korsakov’s Le Coq d’Or (Zolotoy Petushok) to review. I’m with musicologist Richard Taruskin who stated that Rimsky Korsakov was “perhaps the most underrated composer of all time” (and I’m sure his editor insisted on including the “perhaps”).
Venus of Barcelona
Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades straddles two genres. With a macabre plot that explores the boundaries of human obsession, it’s an early psychological thriller that makes the audience engage in a kind of voyeurism Alfred Hitchcock loved. Yet the plot drawn from Pushkin and the striking Romantic score with its references to Mozart, Bizet and Grétry firmly […]
Exotica
Chandos has issued an excellent new CD of Serge Rachmaninoff‘s one-act opera Aleko, written when the composer was only nineteen as a graduation exercise for the Moscow Conservatory.
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Quinn Kelsey and Lise Davidsen star in the Met's new Macbeth. We're giving away one ticket, so screw your courage to the sticking place and enter now!
