I put a spell on you
Armide with a superbly grand Francophone heroine in Karina Gauvin and conducted by the always excellent Ivor Bolton.
Giacomo Meyerbeer
41 pieces since 2010.
41
pieces
17
years
Social Medea
Simone Mayr’s Medea in Corinto, a curious work of 1813, has been revived by Will Crutchfield’s new enterprise, Teatro Nuovo.
Twist of fate
The Verdi Chorus celebrated their 35th anniversary with their spring concert weekend entitled The Force of Destiny last Saturday night and Sunday afternoon.
Every day a little death
Neumeier adapted the story close to home, making Orpheus a choreographer and his wife a star ballerina.
Bringing up Babylon
“Trove Valentine’s Day” further stokes Semiramis-fever with another of the celebrated works about the infamous queen: La Semiramide riconosciuta, a superb 1729 opera by Nicola Porpora.
Steal me, sweet thieves
Ali Baba ou Les Quarantes Voleurs continues straight-tone September with Teresa Stich-Randall as its heroine while Alfredo Kraus scales the heights with another Nadir.
Das Süsses Mädel and the Boy from Berlin
Diana Damrau has chosen for her new Erato recital disc Grand Opera 11 high-flying showpieces from ten operas by Giacomo Meyerbeer.
A “Juive’ for the 21st century
A brilliant production of La Juive like that of Peter Konwitschny generalizes the message that mindless hate does not pay and the mindless mob is always the enemy of civilization.
Crown jewel
I’m a long-time fan of the Opera in English series funded by The Peter Moores Foundation that started, fittingly enough, with conductor Reginald Goodall’s performances of Wagner’s Ring cycle recorded live from the London Coliseum and released by EMI
A Faustian bargain
What we have here is the grandest opera never heard.
Les vêpres de Westchester
The big news from Bel Canto at Caramoor’s presentation of Les Vêpres Siciliennes last Saturday is far from unexpected.
One from the vault
There has never been a successful vampire musical—so they say. But that’s just not true.
Midsummer madness
Handel’s Orlando is one of three operas Handel based on episodes from Ariosto’s best-selling sixteenth-century epic, Orlando Furioso. The story was, in 1733, well known throughout the Mediterranean world, and everyone set it to music—Vivaldi’s and Haydn’s settings have enjoyed recent revivals, and the libretto Handel set had originally been devised for Domenico Scarlatti. Intricate […]
Sail, away
Sir Arthur Sullivan, the son of an Irish father and an Italian mother, studied Mendelssohn’s composition style in Leipzig. He was therefore, inevitably, the supreme English theater composer of his day, and his often Mozartean style of melody is not out of place in a bel canto festival. After all, in the fourteen operettas he […]
Capitol punishment
When Hans Von Bülow joked that Rienzi was Meyerbeer’s best opera, he was not very far off the mark. In fact, Rienzi, der Letze der Tribunen, Wagner’s third opera, has all the traits of a typical “grand opéra”: it is divided in five acts, features a historical character or situation, makes large use of the […]
Cross purposes
The subtitle for Il crociato in Egitto, the last of Meyerbeer’s great Italian operas, is “Historic Melodrama in Two Acts,” and boy is it! A melodrama, I mean. I’m not sure about the historic part.