High and dry
Ilana Walder-Biesanz reports from The Santa Fe Opera, where Tobias Picker‘s latest opera falls short, a new Rodelinda scintillates, and sumptuous singing abounds across the entire repertoire.
Harry Bicket
43 pieces since 2007 — at 8 companies, most often at The English Concert.
43
pieces
8
companies
20
years
Hercules conquers Carnegie
William Guanbo Su and Ann Hallenberg are compelling in The English Concert’s presentation of Handel‘s Hercules at Carnegie Hall.
The René Jacobs Giulio Cesare is so overrated
George Frideric Handel (born 341 years ago on Monday) composed over 40 operas including many masterpieces, but his Giulio Cesare is the one that everyone knows best.
One is silver, the other is Golda
In an all-Mozart program with the San Francisco Symphony, Golda Schultz shows that her soubrette days are behind her.
Marriage is what brings us together today
Le nozze di Figaro in Santa Fe is a light and kindly revival while The Turn of the Screw is crisp and atmospheric
Now you Caesar, now you don’t
Before stopping at Carnegie Hall this weekend, The English Concert returned to the Bay Area last week with a fiery performance of Giulio Cesare
A three-hour tour
We may all be armchair Handelians, but some of us are more used to it than others.
Suspicious conduct
There is a strong case to be made that George Fridrich Handel is the composer most suited to the present moment.
Crowe’s feat
I can still vividly remember the first time the music of George Frideric Handel made an impression on me.
Empty chairs
The fourth production of Santa Fe Opera’s 66th Festival Season that opened on Saturday June 22 offered a multitude of firsts.
Blond ambition
This showcase concert gave notice that countertenor Hugh Cutting is among the most promising artists of his generation.
Coronations and other occasions
While Charles III’s coronation (with Harry but without Meghan and Fergie) commences in London on Saturday, the party started early last month at Carnegie Hall when the Orchestra of St. Luke’s joined by La Chappelle de Québec performed Handel’s gloriously celebratory Coronation Anthems which were composed for a 1727 crowning.
Happy, happy solo woman
There’s nothing unusual about casting a woman in Solomon‘s titular role.
The Multiverse of Morley
A Trove Thursday Mega-Post © featuring the wonderful American soprano Erin Morley in Orff’s Carmina Burana and Richard Strauss’s Brentano Lieder, plus extended live excerpts from Handel’s Orlando, Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots.
Mainly in the plain
I wonder why many New Yorkers have been led to believe that the only Handel conductor in the world is Harry Bicket.
Seria effect
While it must be admitted that Elza van den Heever doesn’t have an ideally warm and agile Handel voice, she evidenced fierce control over her instrument and skillfully built a powerful portrait of the courageous Rodelida fighting for her survival.
Tour de force
In their realization of Alcina, Harry Bicket and his ensemble recreated a dramatically vivid and musically nuanced character study out of the opera’s central figures.
Witchy women
You’d think after nearly 40 years of opera going I’d have seen almost everything.. .twice. Yet I found myself at LA Opera Tuesday night for a special presentation of George Frideric Handel’s Alcina which was my first live experience with one of his operas.
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.
Keep the Rome fires burning
Handel’s biting Agrippina finally arrived at the Metropolitan Opera Thursday evening 310 years after its Venetian premiere.
A Lesbian in distress
Zelmira, a work of 1822, was the last of the eight operas Rossini composed for the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, then the largest opera house in Italy—perhaps in Europe.
In the baroque midwinter
It’s been a rough winter in Chicago, and an especially rough one for lead singers at Lyric Opera of Chicago
Just add magic
Heretofore I’d avoided the Met’s abridged, English-language holiday presentations.
You shall know them by their ‘Flutes’
This year’s Salzburg Festival opens Saturday with a new production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, an opera often performed elsewhere in translation, so “Trove Thursday” offers two for the price (!) of one.