Folks who have never attended a full-length, uncut Giacomo Meyerbeer grand opera have been known to pout and ponder: Why did the most popular opera composer of the mid-nineteenth century all but vanish from the stages of the world after a hundred years?
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In the case of this summer’s resuscitation project at the Bard Summerscape Festival, Camille Saint-Saëns’ Henri VIII , it was quite evident that this is a dramatically sound work with consistently well-crafted, theatrically vital and attractive music that provides at least three roles for gifted singing actors.
It is perhaps a misperception to suggest that Die Schweigsame Frau is stronger in the uncut version.
Like many composers of his generation, Ernest Chausson was enthralled by Wagner and he too turned to legend for his only opera, one that would consume him for final decade of his brief life.
Bard SummerScape’s concert staging of Die Tote Stadt emerged triumphant thanks to Clay Hilley and Sara Jakubiak.
What is the best metaphor for this year’s Bard Music Festival?
The aphorisms projected before each act of Das Wunder der Heliane suggested the work concerns the transformative power of love—but does it really?
Bard cultish Summerscape series continues to test our esoteric limits with Demon, Anton Rubinstein’s little-known opera about a demon who hankers for a Georgian princess.
If you’ve ever wondered what the Lost Boys’ abode might look like lined with mermaids, shopping carts, and unpeeled potatoes, look no further than Christopher Alden’s new production of Peter Pan.
Bard College presented a semi-staged concert of Halka on Saturday evening as part of its impressively wide-ranging two-week “Chopin and his World” festival.
You’d think by now I’d know better than to make snap judgments about an opera or a singer—but apparently not.
“You see, Elaine, Dimitrij was a simple country boy, you might say a cockeyed optimist…”
This year as part of Bard’s “Puccini and His World” festival audiences may witness the resurrection of Mascagni’s distinctly odd Iris.
Despite the continued popularity of Der Freischütz in German-speaking countries, are the magical mature operas of Carl Maria von Weber otherwise really so problematic, their libretti so unwieldy to explain their continued absence from the world’s stages?
Sergey Taneyev, pupil of Tchaikovsky and teacher of Scriabin and Rachmaninov, composed just one opera, Oresteia, premiered in 1895 when he was 39.
Camille Saint-Saëns was such a brilliant, facile musician that pals like Wagner and Liszt felt a distinct schadenfreude when he suffered composer’s block.
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