Married to their jobs
Ahead of their opening in Don Carlo in Dallas tonight, Christopher Corwin chats with Nicole Car and Étienne Dupuis — and offers a special edition of Chris’s Cache!
Robert Carsen
81 pieces since 2010 — at 15 companies, most often at Metropolitan Opera.
81
pieces
15
companies
17
years
Hear, O Israel
As Messiah season begins, Christopher Corwin reports on two of Handel’s forays into the Old Testament.
By Christopher Corwin
Comment
I’m still thinking about Barrie Kosky’s Dialogues des Carmélites
Barrie Kosky’s incredible production widened and universalized the ending.
By Jon Taylor
Comment
Those in glass houses
Krzysztof Warlikowski‘s Der Rosenkavalier at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées surpasses even Nigel Wilkinson‘s high ‘WTF threshhold’
Faust or famine
In a satanic panic, this week Chris’s Cache presents trio of performances of Mefistofele
Quand sur la plage
What can you say, other than that everything was fab?
We’re the kids in America
Needing a Mozart palate-cleanser after the recent misbegotten Marriage of Figaro, I went back more than two decades for a Houston Così fan Tutte featuring then-rising Americans Christine Goerke, Joyce Di Donato, Richard Croft, and Nathan Gunn as the confused lovers.
All dolled up
When my editor suggested to me a round-up of my favorite recordings of Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann I was très, très, intrigued.
Somewhere in time
The current Met revival of Der Rosenkavalier, while not perfect, has much to feel joyful and excited about.
Someday she’ll come along, the girl I love
In Richard Strauss’s Arabella, the heroine is consumed with finding the right man—der Richtige—but who is the right Arabella?
Radically giddy
Verdi’s Falstaff is a brilliantly written opera: funny, with a complex ability to operate across minutely shifting registers of farce and lyricism. It needs, ideally, a production and cast capable of executing both comedy and drama, irony and sincerity—often concurrently. In its current Met revival, happily, Falstaff has everything it needs.
Love me or leaf me
Robert Carsen‘s legendary production of Eugene Onegin finally arrives in San Francisco.
Ceaselessly beautiful
With the phenomenal cast that stacked Paris Opera’s production of I Capuleti e i Montecchi , it was easy to overlook the quirks of Bellini’s opera and get lost in the pleasures of glorious bel canto singing.
Sweet and low: Orlinski’s Orfeo
My impression was of a very fine singer performing a role that was slightly too large for him.
The Multiverse of Morley
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.
Everyone’s gone to the moon
The Met’s recent Ariadne auf Naxos and Elektra combo left me wanting more and more Richard Strauss, so Trove Thursday offers a complete Capriccio with Jonas Kaufmann (his one-and-only Flamand) and Christopher Maltman vying for Soile Isokoski.
Cradle song
While seasonally-awkward streams of Messiah abound, Trove Thursday turns instead to Berlioz’s exquisite L’Enfance du Christ from francophone forces including Stéphanie d’ Oustrac, Bernard Richter, Edwin Crossley-Mercer and Nicolas Testé (for once, sans sa femme).
On the beach
On the first viewing of this Idomeneo, with a cast clad mostly in military khaki green set against a green sky, the eye starts to tire from the dullness of the surroundings.
Mithridates is dead
Trove Thursday marks Mozart’s 264th birthday on Sunday with the 14-year-old’s remarkable opera seria Mitridate, Re di Ponto .
Bass instinct
Günther Groissböck’s ridiculously entertaining Baron Ochs and Sir Simon Rattle’s enthralling conducting soared highest during a mostly excellent revival of Der Rosenkavalier.
Storm of the century
A sense of celebration was definitely in the air last Thursday at the Vienna State Opera.
Agrippina
“Trove Thursday” presents for the third annual installment of “Handel for my Birthday” a wickedly ideal Felicity Palmer dominating Agrippina.
The bad and the beautiful
“Trove Thursday” offers Offenbach’s irreverent La Belle Hélène featuring the beauteous Véronique Gens.
Wien disposition
Following classic recordings documenting the work of Karl Böhm and Herbert von Karajan. Orfeo’s 150 Years Wiener Staatsoper box moves on to new releases that are seeing their first incarnation on an officially available disc.