Anticipation of events like the Metropolitan Opera’s 50th Anniversary bash turns me back into the newly opera-soused kid who begged his parents to let him watch the highlights of the Bing Gala on the family color television.
Sandrine Piau‘s lovely recital with pianist Susan Manoff at The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society on February 14 entered around the themes of sleep, dreams and waking.
Thoughtless direction stifled the epic drama.
Just 85 years ago, four of Italy’s greatest opera stars gathered at Teatro all Scala for an historic event: the first-ever recording of Arrigo Boito’s sole complete opera, Mefistofele.
Nixon in China is one of several titles that when I tell people that it’s on my Top Ten Favorite list of operas, I get strange looks.
I think my love/hate relationship with Händel stems from the fact that during my early days as an operagoer there simply wasn’t any to hear.
Contemporary stagings of Parsifal tend to be spare, abstract affairs scrubbed of religious associations, knights in armor and, sometimes, a grail.
Beneath the pageantry, the paeans to German art and the self-referential allusions to the creative process, Die Meistersinger is a story about a community and human qualities like love, friendship, envy and hatred.
The experience of watching Wagner’s final opera Parsifal is frequently elevated to a spiritual occurrence, and productions have historically emphasized the religious dimension of the opera’s core themes of redemption and the dangers of temptation.
After the success of its Don Giovanni in 2011, Lincoln Center invited Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra to return for the Mostly Mozart Festival premiere (!) of the first of Mozart-da Ponte’s three masterpieces Le Nozze di Figaro late Sunday afternoon at the Rose Theater.
Opera’s Scottish enfant terrible David McVicar has applied his considerable skills in this 2011 Glyndebourne production of Die Meistersinger, the result being a refreshing new take on a familiar warhorse.
The performance at the Metropolitan Opera last night proved that yes, it is possible to kill this opera. I don’t know how they managed it, but they did.
Here’s the thing about puns, Betsy: summer going to enjoy them and summer not.
I would never have imagined that the story of Anna Nicole Smith could be today’s entry in a long line of opera’s “fallen women”—pop culture’s reinvention of Violetta, Manon Lescaut, and Lulu. But that is indeed what composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and librettist Richard Thomas have created in Anna Nicole, commissioned by England’s Royal Opera House…
Despite baby-steps over the years, America’s musical scene, especially opera, remains decidedly un-HIP. (HIP: “historically-informed performance,” also called “period performance.”) While European opera houses turn increasingly to “original instrument” orchestras and specialist singers for seventeenth and eighteenth century works, this rarely occurs in the US.
It’s a sad story, really. Debussy and Maeterlinck had what the kids would call Major Drama over who was to sing Melisande (Mary Garden vs. the person you’ve never heard of) and so Maeterlinck didn’t see Pelleas until years after Debussy had died, so he never got to be like “word!” or, I suppose, “mot!”
I have heard Gerald Finley live and enjoyed his singing immensely. He possesses a strong, resonant, lyric baritone, even of scale and beautiful of timbre. His biggest successes to date have been creating the roles of Oppenheimer in John Adams‘ Dr. Atomic and Harry in Mark-Anthony Turnage‘s The Silver Tassie. He includes selections from both…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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