The bonkers, bewildering Die ägyptische Helena begets a suitably lush musical and creative treatment at Bard SummerScape.
Dull conducting makes Der Freischütz miss its mark at Carnegie Hall.
A starry (and potentially annual) Christmas gala lights up Carnegie Hall.
This Bard production, led by Leon Botstein, makes the strongest possible case musically, dramatically and visually for Smetana’s opera Dalibor.
In Smetana‘s Dalibor, a rescue opera and a nationalistic fable collide at this year’s SummerScape Festival
Eli Jacobson on a luscious evening of early Strauss with Guntram at Carnegie Hall
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?
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.
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.
There is a strong case to be made that George Fridrich Handel is the composer most suited to the present moment.
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.
Richard Strauss’ “Bucolic Tragedy in One Act” Daphne is one of his most beautiful and most frustrating works.
In Richard Strauss’s Arabella, the heroine is consumed with finding the right man—der Richtige—but who is the right Arabella?
It is perhaps a misperception to suggest that Die Schweigsame Frau is stronger in the uncut version.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bard SummerScape’s concert staging of Die Tote Stadt emerged triumphant thanks to Clay Hilley and Sara Jakubiak.
What is the best metaphor for this year’s Bard Music Festival?
The aphorisms projected before each act of Das Wunder der Heliane suggested the work concerns the transformative power of love—but does it really?
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.
Washington Concert Opera on the occasion of Gounod’s 200th birthday presented the American premiere of his first opera, Sapho.
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.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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