To some, Anne Schwanewilms will always be the soprano in the slinky black dress who replaced Deborah Voigt at Covent Garden a decade ago.
Our Own Jungfer Marianne Leitmetzerin presents Natalie Dessay in recital.
With Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Arabella once again on the Met’s stage, I thought I’d take a moment to revisit that opera’s most reviled character, the Fiakermilli.
About this evening: the opera we saw was Arabella, written by a gentleman named Mr. Richard Strauss.
Midway through the first portion of this past Wednesday’s New York City recital debut of Mme. Natalie Dessay I became very distracted by the persistent urge to try to characterize the experience of what was happening on stage, for this was, by no means, an ordinary recital and no ordinary debutante.
Each year, Leon Botstein leads the American Symphony Orchestra in a concert opera or two.
The simple fable at the heart of Die Frau ohne Schatten shouldn’t be difficult to parse, but Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto juggles its vaguely Jungian, vaguely Arabian Nights symbolitry as if with intent to mystify and bewilder.
This DVD
of a Diana Damrau recital (accompanied only by the harpist Xavier de Maistre) is sure to please her legions of fans.
Sergey Taneyev, pupil of Tchaikovsky and teacher of Scriabin and Rachmaninov, composed just one opera, Oresteia, premiered in 1895 when he was 39.
Christian Thielemann has proved himself to be the preeminent Strauss interpreter of the current generation of conductors and he’s in striking form here.
There has never been a successful vampire musical—so they say. But that’s just not true.
The last of the Strauss-Hofmannsthal collaborations, Arabella, is a real problem child.
Kaiser Overall—the name is intended to be sung in English, though the opera is in German—is probably mad, though perhaps no madder than anyone else.
For all its rich evocations of 18th century Vienna and skillful balancing of slapstick and the sublime, Der Rosenkavalier’s popularity has always been rooted in its vivid principal characters.
You Parterrestrials know all about Santa Fe Opera’s amazing mountain setting and open-sided theater affording breathtaking sunsets, weather-related drama and–when the back stage wall is opened–starry backdrops, but it was my first visit, so indulge me a little.
Richard Strauss’s “last romantic opera,” as he called Die Frau Ohne Schatten, is and has always been a problem child.
The Met has finally released the contents of the James Levine 40th Anniversary box sets separately for those of us who didn’t have $500 lying around.
“This is the end of Western culture,” Richard Strauss proclaimed after a rehearsal of his penultimate opera Die Liebe der Danae, in Salzburg in 1944. The octogenarian composer, increasingly on the outs with the Nazis and switched off from contemporary music currents, could well have identified with his protagonist Jupiter, a once-mighty God caught up in an off-kilter…
Since it’s put on in lavish productions at the biggest houses, sung by the biggest stars, since it wrings such a rich sound out of such a small band, and since the musical, formal and literary ambitions of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s great meta-opera are so very grand, it might be easy to…
It seems a thing incredible but fifty years ago Richard Strauss was regarded as the wunderkind composer of a few tone poems, three notable operas (all produced before the First World War) and then nothing notable during forty years of repetitious senility. Even Ariadne auf Naxos, today one of the most popular works in the…
I was on the bus to Nürnberg today on the way to do Wagner tourism and hear Herr Sacro Fuoco tomorrow, and on the way I translated the juicy bits of the full print edition Anna Netrebko article… I was going to post it as a comment but it turns out I thought a lot…
A documentary about the heldentenor Max Lorenz would seem to be an ideal prism through which to examine the moral ambiguities and trade-offs of artistic life in the Third Reich. The preeminent Siegfried, Tristan and Tannhauser of the Nazi era was considered so essential to the success of Bayreuth that Winifred Wagner told Hitler that…
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…
Is it possible for a performance of Richard Strauss’s Elektra to be exciting without an exciting Elektra? It of course depends on your priorities and expectations, which will ultimately determine whether such a performance, as preserved on this DVD from Baden-Baden is for you. Linda Watson’s first assumption of the punishing role of Elektra (she…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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