Let me live by my wits and Trost to my luck
I finally get to complete my personal operatic Top Ten this week with Igor Stravinsky’s only full-length opera, The Rake’s Progress.
8 pieces since 2012 — in 6 roles, at 4 companies, most often at San Francisco Opera.
I finally get to complete my personal operatic Top Ten this week with Igor Stravinsky’s only full-length opera, The Rake’s Progress.
Beautiful singing, thoughtful staging, lovely melodies… a perfect escape from daily life.
Camille Saint-Saëns was such a brilliant, facile musician that pals like Wagner and Liszt felt a distinct schadenfreude when he suffered composer’s block.
Despite the continued popularity of Der Freischütz in German-speaking countries, are the magical mature operas of Carl Maria von Weber otherwise really so problematic, their libretti so unwieldy to explain their continued absence from the world’s stages?
It is not easy for an opera company to follow a spectacular production of La Traviata with Massenet’s Manon.
The big news on Van Ness Avenue, it goes without saying, is Calixto Bieito’s operatic debut on these shores.
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