One moral is that Eugene O’Neill may just not be opera fodder.
Having had many memorable encounters with these characters before, I had been looking forward to encountering them again in an ambitious contemporary Oresteia, but I left the Armory feeling that writer-director Robert Icke just didn’t get it.
So that there’s no confusion: the Long Day’s Journey into Night seen here is contemporary, political, brutal, and universal.
In May of last year tenor Piotr Beczala and soprano Anna Netrebko sang in Lohengrin for the first time under the baton of Christian Thielemann in his home house at the Staatskapelle Dresden.
This year’s treat was Vittorio Gnecchi’s Cassandra, completed around 1905
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