Everybody dance now
Austin McCormack‘s lascivious choreography outshone a tepid and tedious staging of Saint-Saëns’s old-testament epic.
Tomasz Konieczny
31 pieces since 2012 — in 17 roles, at 12 companies, most often at Metropolitan Opera.
31
pieces
17
roles
12
companies
15
years
By role
Role Abimélech
Role Alberich
Something With a ‘Ring’ to It
Cycle II represented an embarrassment of musical riches.
The end is the beginning of the end
At the Metropolitan Opera’s Götterdämmerung on Saturday afternoon, the fires which consumed the Gods burned lukewarm.
Teenager in love
Stefan Vinke’s Siegfried was not so much brawny and terrestrial, but heady and mercurial
Domino theory
The Metropolitan Opera delivers on the promise of Wagner’s Gesamtkunswerk in a revival of Robert Lepage’s Ring.
Gold diggers
Das Rheingold is the outlier among the Ring operas, an ensemble work with a fast-shifting plot, animated dialogue, fewer set pieces and less character development.
By Adriel
7 comments
Role Barak
Storm of the century
A sense of celebration was definitely in the air last Thursday at the Vienna State Opera.
Role Danton
Revolution blues
The opera proved somewhat puzzling—the score representing more a collage of fragmented and incidental musical ideas, and the libretto a turgid, slow-moving mass of purple prose.
Role Der Holländer
Fjord model T
Dmitri Tcherniakov’s interpretation of Wagner’s Der Fliegende Höllander presents an engrossing character study about Senta and the Dutchman’s struggles against their insular community’s stifling conformism.
Role Don Pizarro
On the party platform
Don’t expect any sweeping statements from Franz Welser-Möst ‘s polished, if dramatically inert, Fidelio.
Semper Fidelio
Fidelio, which opened last week at the Metropolitan Opera, will always be relevant, I fear.
Role Dutchman
Ohne Ziel, ohne Rast
Instead of following the story, we in the audience spend most of the evening thinking “What?? Why is that happening?”
Die Frist ist Glum
This Holländer offers neither a clear narrative vision for the work nor a sense of turbocharged drama; it simply sits on the Met’s cavernous stage as a dull gray mass.
Role Friedrich von Telramund
Tragedy tonight
In May of last year tenor Piotr Beczala and soprano Anna Netrebko sang in Lohengrin for the first time under the baton of Christian Thielemann in his home house at the Staatskapelle Dresden.
Role Jack Rance
Hello from the other side
A woman reads from the Bible. There is a dance scene in a tavern. The discovery of blood gives away the protagonist.
Role Jochanaan
A dream deferred
Andris Nelsons led the Vienna Philharmonic in a performance of Salome that provided just the sort of thing one hopes for in a concert performance of an overflowingly rich operatic score.
Role Kurwenal
Tunnel vision
Lise Davidsen, Michael Spyres, and Yannick Nézet-Séguin are astonishing in Tristan und Isolde at the Met, while Yuval Sharon‘s new production is anything but.
Role Mandryka
Girlhood, interrupted
Erin Wall was an elegant, warm, and sensitive Arabella.
Not quite right
The last of the Strauss-Hofmannsthal collaborations, Arabella, is a real problem child.
Role Rance
Golden ‘Girls’ season finale
The conclusion of our Fanciulla del West video overview in three parts looks at a trio of performances from the 2010s.
Role Telramund
Salvation for the savior
Kaufmann conveys Lohengrin’s immense loneliness in a profoundly moving way. I am happy to report that vocally he sounds completely recovered.
Role Wanderer
Brass ring
Marek Janowski’s survey of Wagner operas on PentaTone so convincingly captures the pulse and dramatic flow of many of the works that the music-making at times sounds almost effortless.
By Adriel
3 comments
Role Wotan
This is what trauma looks like
Valentin Schwarz‘s and Simone Young‘s Ring, in its final outing at Bayreuth, is dramaturgically messy and musically excellent.
Approaching Valhalla
Gianandrea Noseda leads seasoned Wagnerians in Andreas Homoki’s stark production of Die Walküre for Zurich Opera.
To the hilt
Marek Janowski’s second recorded Ring cycle began on an off note, with a Rheingold that was fleet and lucid but failed to impress in the important musical moments.
By Adriel
6 comments
Springtime for Wagner
Could Marek Janowski do for Wagner what the early music movement did for the Baroque and Classical repertory?
By Adriel
9 comments
Role Wozzeck
Hell on wheels
Absent from Chicago Lyric Opera’s repertory for 21 years, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck came roaring into town on Sunday afternoon in a stunning new production by Sir David McVicar.