Conductor Eun Sun Kim and soprano Elza van der Heever play to their strengths in a piercing revival of Elektra at San Francisco Opera.
“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays” – Soren Kierkegaard
Nina Stemme’s Elektra always seemed the sanest individual onstage never quite giving over to obsession or hysteria with a good line in mordant sarcasm and contempt.
Cycle II represented an embarrassment of musical riches.
At the Metropolitan Opera’s Götterdämmerung on Saturday afternoon, the fires which consumed the Gods burned lukewarm.
Christian Thielemann is widely regarded as our time’s preeminent master of the Austro-German symphonic ensemble.
“Trove Thursday” offers Die Frau ohne Schatten conducted by Georg Solti and also featuring Regina Resnik, Donald McIntyre and the inevitable James King.
No other singer of Die Amme approaches the towering standard set by the German mezzo Tanja Ariane Baumgartner.
Christine Goerke‘s puzzling high register has become an increasingly troubling aspect of her singing. One just never knew what was going to come out from one moment to the next.
A new CD
features the ten most gorgeous minutes recorded by a tenor in Wagner since World War II.
Richard Strauss’s “last romantic opera,” as he called Die Frau Ohne Schatten, is and has always been a problem child.
Not a fairy kingdom, but rather an unheated postwar Vienna ballroom transformed into an improvised recording studio: that’s the setting for Christof Loy‘s new production of Die Frau Ohne Schatten at Salzburg. The production is also (if not more so) notable for Christian Thielemann‘s virtuouso conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic and the hair-raising performances of…
David McVicar’s ravishingly lurid 2008 production of Strauss’s Salome for the Royal Opera House Covent Garden has been issued as an HD-filmed DVD from Opus Arte. Now, Strauss’s music is ravishingly lurid on its own, so I came to this production, which claims as a visual source reference the Pasolini film Salo, The 120 Days…
The moral of Lohengrin is clearly set out: Don’t talk on your wedding night. Even more important, don’t sing. Happily, at Lyric Opera of Chicago, Johan Botha in the title role and Amber Wagner as Elsa of Brabant ignored this advice.
I saw the final dress rehearsal of Adriana Lecouvreur at the Royal Opera House on Monday this week, and I think I have never seen the place so crowded for such an event. No wonder, for here was a cast you might dream of, in a highly finished piece of work mounted by one of…
I’d never actually seen a production of Lohengrin before I agreed to review a new Decca DVD of Richard Jones‘s staging for the Bayerische Staastoper, starring Jonas Kaufmann, so I hope I’ve got this right: It’s about this architect named Elsa, who lives in an Orwellian steampunk Germany that has videocamera technology but still dresses like…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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