I don’t know if it’s overrated because I don’t think anyone rates it, but for pure party disc joy not much beats this 2018 recording of the original 1847 version of Verdi‘s Macbeth.
Nigel Wilkinson reports on Teodor Curentzis and Peter Sellars‘s new production of Rameau‘s Castor et Pollux in Paris.
Janácek’s disconcerting commentary on youth and immortality received a full-throated performance.
The Met’s planned premiere of Iolanta/Bluebeard’s Castle was cancelled due to the Great Blizzard That Wasn’t.
Apparently, opera fans got the bright side of the bargain: say “Macbeth” in the theater and you court cataclysm; utter the name in the opera house and, as often as not, you merely predict disappointment.
Giovanni Simone Mayr was one of the most important musical figures of his day, a man Rossini referred to as the “father of Italian opera” whom Napoleon personally lobbied to come work in Paris. Though he wrote nearly 70 operas and taught Donizetti and Bellini, the Bavarian-born composer had the misfortune of hitting his peak…
Noticing how often she turns up lately, one might guess that the operatic “heroine” for the global economic crunch is Medea, the mythological Greek sorceress and filicide.
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…
Lyric Opera of Chicago has entrusted their new Macbeth to Barbara Gaines, Artistic Director of the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, whose work can be frustratingly inconsistent. She has directed the finest Troilus and Cressida and the finest King Lear that I have ever seen. Yet her recent work has been filled with wretched excess and effects…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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