Wedding from hell
Les Arts Florissants (lightly) stages two Charpentier rarities as a summer wedding gone wrong.
Neal Goren
14 pieces since 2010 — at 2 companies, most often at Gotham Chamber Opera.
14
pieces
2
companies
17
years
By company
Big time sensuality
Barbara Strozzi links two sensuous programs by L’Arpeggiata and Catapult Opera.
The head on the cake plate
John Yohalem reports on Catapult Opera’s satiating San Giovanni Battista
The Bible meets Edward Albee
The Met doesn’t have the monopoly on Salome this spring — look no further than Catapult Opera’s San Giovanni Battista which opens in Brooklyn next month.
Hiding in plain sight
An air of discovery pervaded the first New York presentation of La ville morte much the way that it pervades the opera’s plot itself.
Puss perfect
Xavier Montsalvatge is best known in these parts for the songs of his “Antilles” period in the 1940s, the exquisite “Cinco Canciones Negras” and so on, making use of rhythms and melodies with a Caribbean flavor.
Martinu, very dry
Gotham Chamber Opera, which began to operate twelve years ago with a double bill of Bohuslav Martinu’s quirky little pieces, opened its 2014-15 season with two more, Alexandre bis (Alexander, twice) and Comedy on the Bridge.
Orpheus goes downtown
Marc-Antoine Charpentier came along at the wrong time for a composer of French opera.
Canard als Gast
This week’s canard is contributed in by the artistic director of Gotham Chamber Opera, Neal Goren.
Breaking Baden
Baden-Baden 1927 is the title Gotham Chamber Opera has given to its evening of four brief operas that premiered together at a festival in, yes, Baden-Baden on July 17, 1927.
Fleur du mal
Nathaniel Hawthorne, the repentant Puritan—that is, he repented that his family had once been Puritans—describes the voice of Rappaccini’s Daughter, Beatrice, as “rich as a tropical sunset, … which made Giovanni, though he knew not why, think of deep hues of purple or crimson and of perfumes heavily delectable.”
The Roman stain
Gotham Chamber Opera stumbled so badly Friday night with Francesco Cavalli’s 1668 Eliogabalo at The Box, it was hard to know whether to feel sad or angry—or both.
Room for improvement
It’s hard to think of a rare work by a great composer more tailor-made for a twenty-first century reexamination than Mozart’s Il Sogno di Scipione.
Dark side of the moon
Gotham Chamber Opera presented Haydn’s Il Mondo della Luna on Tuesday evening at the Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium, in a production that took advantage of the museum’s NASA constellations and a multitude of other more economical yet impressive stage and lighting effects. Despite cramped quarters and inhospitable acoustics, the company made a strong […]