Staring into the abbess
Dan Johnson gives an inside look at the creation of Sarah Kirkland Snider‘s rapturous new opera Hildegard which opens at New York’s PROTOTYPE Festival next week.
W. H. Auden
20 pieces since 2010.
20
pieces
17
years
I’m still thinking about John Cox’s The Rake’s Progress
I came to The Rake’s Progress with a huge “Show Me” chip on my shoulder.
By Peter Russell
Comment
What belongs to us
Kevin Ng sits down with PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novelist and critic Garth Greenwell to talk about sex, queerness, and the “promise of opera.”
This magic moment
Look, for one of the most-staged operas in the repertoire, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte seems awfully difficult to stage.
Seek to set him right
It was, at least, a jolly good show. Whether or not it actually suited Stravinsky’s music or Auden and Kallman’s text, is another question.
Making the trivial triumphant
On this day in 1978, the Metropolitan Opera presented a new production of Donizetti’s La favorita.
Varying the song
The opera The Rake’s Progress, as many people know already, was inspired by a series of engravings and paintings of the same name by William Hogarth, showing the decline of a young man into depravity and insanity.
Work on ‘Progress’
Young voices ringing out Stravinsky’s witty melodies at close quarters gives great pleasure if you are fond of this witty score and its many parodies of early operatic cliché.
Thank you for the music
Trove Thursday celebrates early St. Cecilia’s Day—November 22—with a 1976 performance of Licino Refice’s Cecilia starring Renata Scotto as the patron saint of music and musicians.
Dish honored
Lise Davidsen turned in a fine performance Saturday, cementing her up-and-coming star status in an eclectic program given from the Oscarshall Palace in Oslo.
Call me madman
This past weekend was a busy one for operas in San Francisco (and Bay Area).
Unprotected
Antonacci’s singing is remarkably beautiful for one who clearly doesn’t make that a top priority.
Word problem
I’ve been picking away yet again at the mysterious symbiosis between an opera’s words and its music.
Operas on the verge of a nervous breakdown
It’s a pity that Francis Poulenc took so long to getting around to compose his operas.
Let me live by my wits and Trost to my luck
I finally get to complete my personal operatic Top Ten this week with Igor Stravinsky’s only full-length opera, The Rake’s Progress.
Head space
The best part of Paul Appleby’s recital for the Philadelphia Chamber Society came in his last two groups.
Golden oldie
Eight hundred years ago, the “youth of Beauvais” in the north of France created a sacred festival “play,” Ludus Danieli (ludus—meaning a sacred event? a performance? a game? a joke?) for the annual Fool’s Night on January 1 at the cathedral.
I hear American singing
Since an early appearance as Schaunard in Baz Luhrmann’s Broadway La bohème, barihunk Daniel Okulitch has been steadily building a substantial career. Along with noteworthy performances as Don Giovanni in New York and Figaro in Le nozze di Figaro in Los Angeles, much of his career has been centered on contemporary work. He has leading […]
Words without song
Long ago, in a galaxy far away – I mean, the era before supertitles became common in opera houses around the world – you could always tell the text-mad opera fan. He was the one who arrived early to the theater and spent the remaining minutes to curtain hunched over his libretto booklet, trying to […]
Rake, no progress
James Levine: Celebrating 40 Years at the Met includes not only unreleased video performances on DVD but also live radio broadcasts on CD. This performance is one of the latter, originally heard April 19, 2003. The Rake’s Progress has one of the greatest operatic pedigrees of all time. It was inspired by a series of […]