Ma queer immortelle
San Francisco Opera hosts an exuberant tribute to queerness past and present.
Jacques Offenbach
26 pieces since 2009.
26
pieces
18
years
Life in the Faust lane
Théâtre de l’Athénée Louis-Jouvet mounts a raucous production of Hervé’s Le petit Faust.
All the fine young cannibals
Offenbach‘s Robinson Crusoé is salvaged from obscurity.
Nothing makes me feel better than Grisélidis
From an early age I knew I should have been French.
By Belfagor
Comment
Change my mind about performing operetta in English
I so don’t get why any company in the Anglophone world ever bothers to perform Continental operetta in English.
By Last Castrato
139 comments
There’s a parade in town
Les Brigands at the Paris Opera is an expensive joke that never lands
Change my mind about Parsifal
Parsifal just gives me the creeps – a muddy maundery concoction that wallows in faux religiosity, a creepy view of sin, and naïve redemption.
By Belfagor
201 comments
Georges has Georges
A double bill of rare Bizet works in Paris is not something any of us needs to do more than once
Avant de quitter la scène
As of late, the Bay Area has been blessed with a few high-wattage, high-profile recitals as if to compensate for the chilly temperatures and gloomy weather. Roughly a month after Lise Davidsen made an ebullient debut at Cal Performances, the Bay Area welcomed French soprano Natalie Dessay last Saturday.
All dolled up
When my editor suggested to me a round-up of my favorite recordings of Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann I was très, très, intrigued.
No sex please, we’re German
Why is so twinkling, tuneful a score so little known?
To love the language
With most of us dug in for the duration, there’s no better time to tuck into a CD box set of neglected treasures. Not that I needed an excuse, mind you.
Pearl of wisdom
Odyssey Opera’s Ägyptische Helena was a beautifully executed production of a flawed opera.
Briefs encounter
Trial by Jury was the operetta chosen by Lamplighters Music Theatre, the San Francisco-based Gilbert & Sullivan company, to close their 66th season.
I think we’ve got her number
“Are we Team Guelf or Team Ghibelline?”
King of the Neapolitan road
At Palermo’s Teatro Massimo, Zerline, the heroine of Auber’s once beloved Fra Diavolo , undresses down to frilly French skivvies.
Star and garters
No amount of scholarly diligence has kept Les contes d’Hoffmann from being the messiest of all standard-repertory messes.
French tickler
The concert presented by Opera Lafayette at the Alliance Française last Friday and Saturday was devoted to music of witty, short-lived Emmanuel Chabrier, notably Une Éducation Manquée.
Et in Arcadia, libido
A performance space called the Sheen Center has opened its doors way down the far end of Bleecker Street, a stoner’s throw from where CBGB’s used to thrive beside the itsy-bitsy Amato Opera House. (You never forget your first Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio.) Sheen Center, sizable and modern and slim on personality, contains two […]
Hell night
I got quite a surprise when I opened the latest packet of goodies from La Cieca – a DVD of Orphée aux Enfers, but in German as Orpheus in der Unterwelt.
With a little bit of Gluck
The best joke in Offenbach’s delicious Orphée aux Enfers is the opening premise: Orphée and Eurydice are miserably married, due to her utter boredom with his old-fashioned music.
Gualtier tells “Tales”
So, I was asking my friends with Met Opera insider connections about the new Hoffmann production directed by Bartlett Sher. Seemingly conceived under an unlucky star, this production first lost two of its four heroines when Anna Netrebko decided not sing Olympia and Giulietta but kept Antonia and also Stella, leaving the dramaturgy somewhat lopsided.
Blue movie
For those of us newly accustomed to watching The Met: Live in HD cinecasts and similar events in our neighborhood theaters, it is easy to forget that opera as cinema was once a very different experience. Ritter Blaubart, one in a series of seven films by Walter Felsenstein recently released on DVD, shows us the […]