(A)nything (B)ut (C)armen
Calling from 2066, Brendan Latimer argues that the best way to save opera might be to just blow up the standard repertoire altogether.
Dmitri Shostakovich
16 pieces since 2009.
16
pieces
18
years
Hit me with your best Shoshty
Barrie Kosky’s zany production of The Nose time-steps back onto the Komische Oper Berlin stage.
Road shows
Brendan Latimer hitches a ride with members of the “site-responsive opera” movement who are taking their shows out of the opera house — and out of the box.
Now I’m an old believer
Big voices overwhelm Claus Guth‘s toothless staging of Khovanshchina at the Berlin Staatsoper.
Color me impressed
Bay Area audiences starved for vocal fare during its opera’s winter/spring hiatus recently experienced two exceptional concerts with distinguished singing at the Davies Symphony Hall.
Singing for herself and the boys in the band
Boston Symphony Orchestra recently confirmed an infinitely renewable contract upon Andris Nelsons, its music director since 2014. To understand why, one needed little more evidence than the outfit’s recent visit to Carnegie Hall.
Bored to death
Trove Thursday offers Shostakovich’s 1962 Katerina Izmailova with Australian soprano Marie Collier as its anti-heroine and Jon Vickers as her lover.
Sadko, but true
“Trove Thursday” escapes to an exotic place with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko.
And never brought to mind
It would be generous to say that history comes alive on the operatic stage.
Humans of old Madrid
Bare Opera, the feisty little company that gave Debussy’s exquisite L’Enfant Prodigue in Chelsea last spring, is now operating in chic, rundown Bushwick where so many original enterprises sprout.
Fungus home
I can’t think of another 20th century opera which has grown so fast in popularity so long after its composition than Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
The year in Yohalem
My memory is fading but the events I recall most vividly of the last season seem largely to have been concert performances.
Katerina’s insomnia
Throw in a trio of murders and a healthy splash of vodka and you have, more or less, the plot of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
Notes on camp
Zofia Posmysz spent two years as a prisoner in Auschwitz—and she’s still alive and standing pretty tall, in New York for the Lincoln Center Festival God bless her.
Song of Crimea
My mailbox is filled with cards and letters, all asking the same question: “Croche, is there a classical music angle to the escalating conflict in Crimea?” My answer is: “Indeed there is!”
Snow business
The life of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is almost as melodramatic as that of its heroine. Composed in the early 1930’s, the opera was well received at its 1934 Leningrad premiere, and was also a success in Moscow a couple of years later. Then one evening Stalin came to see it and […]