Whenever I encounter Eric Owens, he’s plotting to conquer the universe.
Before you depart the Met at the end of this season, Ms. Billinghurst, you have the chance to do some good for both the Met audience and James Levine.
I can think of no other case that resembles Handel’s complex relationship to the story—derived from Ovid’s Metamorphoses—of the ill-fated love between the shepherd Acis and the sea nymph Galatea.
An impresario with a hit on his hands—Emanuel Schikaneder, for instance, after the initial run of Die Zauberflöte—will crave nothing so much as an opportunity to hit the same bell.
It’s hard to come up with any sensible reason to dislike Joyce DiDonato.
While James Levine’s name might not immediately spring to mind when pondering the great Mozart conductors, he does have a long and distinguished career leading operas by the Austrian master.
Last night, the Met opened the 2013-14 season with a handsome, fairly conservative new production of Eugene Onegin by Deborah Warner that replaces the handsome, fairly conservative one by Robert Carsen. (The trend is clear.)
In the program for Opera Omnia’s production of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno di Ulisse, Crystal Manich, the company’s stage director, speaks of producing “baroque works in non-traditional ways.”
The 19th century could not cope with Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti (Thus Do They All, or The School for Lovers) with a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte and music by Mozart, first presented in Vienna in 1790.
There is a mighty appetite among both old Wagnerians and new ones to see a Ring that follows—if not too slavishly—the scenic requests of the libretto.
If Frank Castorf‘s work on Der Ring des Nibelungen at Bayreuth accomplishes nothing else, it should serve as a sort of loud disorganized reminder of the dangers of indulging in the intentional fallacy.
The 1965 season was a time of big changes at the Vienna State Opera.
Is Der Ring des Nibelungen responsible for the transformation of Seattle from a gray, damp, low-rise Boeing company town where half the jokes had punchlines in Norwegian (and were about lutefisk in any case) into today's booming cultural metropolis? I like to think so.
What we have here is the grandest opera never heard.
After the success of its Don Giovanni in 2011, Lincoln Center invited Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra to return for the Mostly Mozart Festival premiere (!) of the first of Mozart-da Ponte’s three masterpieces Le Nozze di Figaro late Sunday afternoon at the Rose Theater.
Sergey Taneyev, pupil of Tchaikovsky and teacher of Scriabin and Rachmaninov, composed just one opera, Oresteia, premiered in 1895 when he was 39.
The behavioral phenomenon of limerence has been described as “an involuntary potentially inspiring state of adoration and attachment to a limerent object involving intrusive and obsessive thoughts, feelings and behaviors from euphoria to despair, contingent on perceived emotional reciprocation.”
Giuseppe and I have always had a complicated relationship.
Taneev was quite a high-minded fellow, so it’s not altogether surprising that nothing less than Aeschylus (and the whole of his Oresteia!) would suffice as a libretto for his first and only opera.
East is West and West is East—the border ever less easy to fix.
The big news from Bel Canto at Caramoor’s presentation of Les Vêpres Siciliennes last Saturday is far from unexpected.
American mezzo Jamie Barton, who has steadily been winning fans in the US over the past few years for her rich and nuanced singing, took the international opera world by storm last weekend by winning both the Song Prize as well as the overall prize in the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition.
Name a Verdi opera, based on a play by Voltaire, described in the immortal words of the composer as “Questo e proprio brutto.”
Handel’s first surviving musical composition is Almira, the opera he wrote in a hurry when shake-ups at the Hamburg opera house, where the 19-year-old had been playing in the violin section, left a planned production unfinished.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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