Speaking ill of the dead
Plácido Domingo’s conducting reduced the score’s urgency to the lethargy of a jellyfish.
Charles Gounod
37 pieces since 2006.
37
pieces
21
years
Apparition
There was a moment during Natalie Dessay’s performance of Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade” when the singer summoned the ghost of her former self.
Foolish love
The Met ushers out this wretched year and rings in the new with an elegant and effective new production of Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette.
French tickler
The concert presented by Opera Lafayette at the Alliance Française last Friday and Saturday was devoted to music of witty, short-lived Emmanuel Chabrier, notably Une Éducation Manquée.
Inappropriately touching
“Operatic” generally refers to sung drama, but there is another meaning of that term: grandiose, outsize, hysterical.
Youth is wasted on the old
Piotr Beczala, Soile Isokoski and Kwangchul Youn star in this 2009 performance of Faust from the Wiener Staatsoper, idiomatically conducted by Bertrand de Billy.
Zing went the strings
This DVD
of a Diana Damrau recital (accompanied only by the harpist Xavier de Maistre) is sure to please her legions of fans.
One for the vault
Of all of Verdi’s operas. Aida is the one I find least interesting dramatically.
Thirds and music
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.
Nott so hott
British soprano Dame Felicity Lott and her frequent partner, the pianist Graham Johnson, have collaborated on a new recital disc for Champs Hill Records, “Call Me Flott.” Do we really have to?
The bad and the beautiful
Packaged with a peek-a-boo cover exposing only Bryn Terfel’s lovely left eye (the effect of turning the page to reveal the Welsh bass-baritone’s head in its entirety brings to mind this Encyclopedia Dramatica entry) and an oddly hip-hop-flavored gray-on-black treatment of the album’s title, Terfel’s Bad Boys seems designed for those who like their divos […]
Star-crossed in Crescent City
La Cieca’s misnomered intime No Expert writes: The New Orleans Opera Association likes to describe New Orleans as “America’s First City of Opera,” and it’s true that opera performance has a long history in the Crescent City, dating back to at least 1796 when André Ernest Grétry’s Sylvain was presented. Since then, New Orleans, and […]
Lay the Blame on Dame
You would think that La Cieca would climb on her very high horse about the elementary school music theater in Colorado who riled up parents by showing the “Who’s Afraid of Opera?” version of Gounod’s Faust to her students. And certainly some of those parents overreacted in the good old American way. (One mom called […]