The juice is on the loose
The bonkers, bewildering Die ägyptische Helena begets a suitably lush musical and creative treatment at Bard SummerScape.
Leon Botstein
38 pieces since 2010 — at 7 companies, most often at American Symphony Orchestra.
38
pieces
7
companies
17
years
Dodging a bullet
Dull conducting makes Der Freischütz miss its mark at Carnegie Hall.
O stars of wonder, stars of night
A starry (and potentially annual) Christmas gala lights up Carnegie Hall.
He plays the violin
This Bard production, led by Leon Botstein, makes the strongest possible case musically, dramatically and visually for Smetana’s opera Dalibor.
Come on, baby, and rescue me
In Smetana‘s Dalibor, a rescue opera and a nationalistic fable collide at this year’s SummerScape Festival
You can go your own way
Eli Jacobson on a luscious evening of early Strauss with Guntram at Carnegie Hall
A vision almost like a prophecy
Folks who have never attended a full-length, uncut Giacomo Meyerbeer grand opera have been known to pout and ponder: Why did the most popular opera composer of the mid-nineteenth century all but vanish from the stages of the world after a hundred years?
Decadent genealogies
Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder and Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot are, in their different ways, the final decadent flowering of a musical tradition at its twilight.
Repent for the time is at hand
Traditional Christianity has always used the threat of dying unabsolved and going to Hell as a tool to get us not only to accept Jesus but also obey the dictates of the Church. Last week in New York, two classical works touched on the theme of repentance and absolution.
Suspicious conduct
There is a strong case to be made that George Fridrich Handel is the composer most suited to the present moment.
Horne aplenty
Recent discussion about the merits of Le Prophète has prompted Chris’s Cache to unearth a pirate recording of Meyerbeer’s opera with Marilyn Horne, Rita Shane and Guy Chauvet led by Charles Mackerras, along with an earlier collaboration of the mezzo and conductor: Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice in which Horne goes to hell to get back Adriana Maliponte with the help of Judith Blegen.
I’ll plant my own tree
Richard Strauss’ “Bucolic Tragedy in One Act” Daphne is one of his most beautiful and most frustrating works.
Someday she’ll come along, the girl I love
In Richard Strauss’s Arabella, the heroine is consumed with finding the right man—der Richtige—but who is the right Arabella?
Silent treatment
It is perhaps a misperception to suggest that Die Schweigsame Frau is stronger in the uncut version.
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.
The key of dreams
My sister Julie celebrates an important birthday later this month which reminded me—as I also recalled I visiting her while she was living in Prague—that I should unearth Bohuslav Martin?’s Julietta with Lucia Popp and Dénes Gulyás for this week’s Trove Thursday.
Riddle me this
Turandot finally arrives on Trove Thursday, but it’s the setting by Ferruccio Busoni which predates by a decade the one by that other Italian guy, and it’s paired today with Arlecchino, the composer’s other commedia dell’arte-influenced short opera.
Round Table discussion
Like many composers of his generation, Ernest Chausson was enthralled by Wagner and he too turned to legend for his only opera, one that would consume him for final decade of his brief life.
Sweet dreams
Bard SummerScape’s concert staging of Die Tote Stadt emerged triumphant thanks to Clay Hilley and Sara Jakubiak.
Trial by Korngold
What is the best metaphor for this year’s Bard Music Festival?
Strangers when we meet
The aphorisms projected before each act of Das Wunder der Heliane suggested the work concerns the transformative power of love—but does it really?
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.
Poetess without portfolio
Washington Concert Opera on the occasion of Gounod’s 200th birthday presented the American premiere of his first opera, Sapho.
I’m no angel
Bard cultish Summerscape series continues to test our esoteric limits with Demon, Anton Rubinstein’s little-known opera about a demon who hankers for a Georgian princess.
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).
Win a Free Ticket to Opening Night at the Met!
Quinn Kelsey and Lise Davidsen star in the Met's new Macbeth. We're giving away one ticket, so screw your courage to the sticking place and enter now!
