Dido it again
“Trove Thursday” presents Purcell’s remarkably concise Dido and Aeneas in a pair of fascinatingly different interpretations.
Gerald Finley
40 pieces since 2010 — in 18 roles, at 6 companies, most often at Metropolitan Opera.
40
pieces
18
roles
6
companies
17
years
By role
Role Aeneas
Role Amfortas
Grail mix
Contemporary stagings of Parsifal tend to be spare, abstract affairs scrubbed of religious associations, knights in armor and, sometimes, a grail.
Critical care
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.
Role Antony
Classic example: ‘Antony’ at SFO
Antony and Cleopatra was an auspicious start to San Francisco Opera’s second century, a performance that seems to improve as I continue to think about it.
Role Argante
Dienstag mit Marianne
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.
Role Athanaël
Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes
A wonderfully committed Ailyn Pérez and Gerald Finley at Saturday afternoon’s revival abetted by Emmanuel Villaume’s passionate conducting converted me to a Thaïs believer.
Role Bluebeard
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.
Skeleton key
Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle both use themes of vision and revelation to ask compelling questions about knowledge, responsibility, and gender.
Role Chou En-lai
We have begun to celebrate the different ways
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.
Role Count Almaviva
A crazier day
Saturday’s performance of Le nozze di Figaro at the Met mined the humor from Mozart’s divine setting of Beaumarchais’s play about a crazy day in the Almaviva household.
Can this “Marriage” be saved?
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.
Role Don Alfonso
A delicate balance
Saturday’s performance of Così fan tutte demonstrated that even the cool, acerbic wit of Mozart’s most controversial comedy can warm our hearts in these icy winter months.
Role Golaud
The sea was angry that day, my friends
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!”
Role Guillaume Tell
Mark, missed
Thoughtless direction stifled the epic drama.
Role Hans Sachs
Meadow festival
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.
By Adriel
6 comments
Sachs appeal
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.
Role Howard Stern
I am a camera
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 […]
Role Iago
The evil that men do
The Canadian Opera Company’s new production of Otello is a collection of welcome returns.
Role Mark Antony
Sexual orientalization
An impressive cast blurs binaries as John Adams‘s ambitious Antony and Cleopatra arrives at the Met
Role Priest/Angel of the Agony
I had too much to dream last night
Trove Thursday previews next week’s BBC Proms presentation of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius with a 2008 broadcast conducted by Colin Davis with Sarah Connolly, Ben Heppner and Gerald Finley.
Role Scarpia
Hard candy
It’s perhaps because Puccini is the master of operatic pathos that Tosca has proved so hard for people to get a handle on.
Role Tell
Digging in the dirt
Even those of us who consider Guillaume Tell Rossini’s greatest opera understand why it has not been his most frequently staged.