Down for the comte
Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Le Comte Ory was a lovely cake with waaaay too much frosting.
Kathryn Lewek
10 pieces since 2017 — in 4 roles, at 3 companies, most often at Metropolitan Opera.
10
pieces
4
roles
3
companies
10
years
Role Countess Adele
Role Elettra
Suffering a sea-change
Calixto Bieito‘s production of Idomeneo at La Monnaie is anchored by a committed cast, but gets swept up in pseudo-psychoanalytic imagery — and foot fetishism.
Role Queen of Night
Birds, bears, and based boyfriends
While the Met’s Mozart-lite holiday production of The Magic Flute kept the eyes entertained with spectacular sets and costumes, the scattershot casting and lack of musical seriousness dragged down this opera for beginners.
Role Queen of the Night
This magic moment
Look, for one of the most-staged operas in the repertoire, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte seems awfully difficult to stage.
Crazy extremes
Simon McBurney’s Die Zauberflöte, the second new production of the Met’s May Mozart Miracle, opened on Friday to rousing near-unanimous cheers.
You better sit down kids
If Sunday’s performance of Magic Flute at the Met demonstrated one thing, it is that opera targeted at children must be just as good as (if not better than) opera targeted at adults.
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.
Dark matter
In Schikaneder’s patriarchal cosmology, darkness is the province of emotional women—not just the erratic fury of the Queen of the Night, but the pathetic supplications of Pamina as well.
I’ll take the fall
The days are getting shorter, but you can keep the prattle going this fall’s Talk of the Town! You will, you can, you must join in the discussion about: Great mezzo soprano performances (October),
Gained in translation (November), Teleport me back to… (December).