I must admit a certain trepidation when I received the press kit announcing that the role of Miles in Juilliard’s performances of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw was to be sung by soprano Britt Hewitt and not a boy treble, but those concerns were dashed by the second scene of the opera. Read more »
From the moment months ago that Juilliard Opera announced it would be staging the first US production in nearly 20 years of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s monumental Hippolyte et Aricie my heart has been filled with admiration and gratitude. But just before the generally admirable first performance concluded Tuesday evening at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater the assembled forces committed such a catastrophic misstep that I had my head in my hands groaning in disbelief instead of joining in the general applause around me. Read more »
Celebrated conductor William Christie, widely considered among the foremost interpreters of early-music for modern audiences, and his acclaimed ensemble Les Arts Florissants have delighted audiences at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) for 30 years. On March 1st, they return with Rameau, maître à danser, featuring two rarely seen operas originally penned by 18th-century French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau for the court of Louis XV.
A pastoral atmosphere prevails throughout La naissance d’Osiris, a one-act ballet set to a libretto by Louis de Cahusac commissioned to celebrate the birth of the Duke of Berry, future Louis XVI; Daphnis et Églé tells the story of two lovers ignorant of their own love for each other, charming audiences with its use of classic European dance styles like sarabande, gavotte, gigue, minuet, tambourin, and contredanse.
Both operatic miniatures served as a symbol of the court’s opulence as well as a source of evening entertainment; together, as Rameau, maître à danser, they serve as a sublime showcase for Christie’s singular brilliance and the ravishing power of baroque music. At the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House Mar 1—3. Read more »
Luckless Otto Nicolai belongs to the large company of opera composers who never reached forty. Barely out of his twenties, he went south to Milan and scored a palpable hit, Il Templario, based on Ivanhoe. On the strength of this, he was offered a confused but epic libretto, a Biblical farrago entitled Nabucodonosor. He turned it down, and the impresario gave it to an even younger composer named Verdi. When this came to the stage, Nicolai said, “I told you no one could write music to that libretto,” and returned to Prussia. Read more »
Whatever its flaws, La finta giardinera is indeed a wise rep choice for grad students eager to cut their teeth.
All those who have been in a rage since the news broke this week that the Metropolitan Opera has invited Calixto Bieito to stage Verdi’s La Forza del Destino can relax and embrace the Juilliard Opera’s new Le Nozze di Figaro which opened Friday night.
The Rape of Lucretia, now (through Sunday) enjoying a superb three-performance run at the Juilliard Opera’s Willson Theater (tickets are scarce; hie thee to the waiting list), was Benjamin Britten’s third opera and first “chamber opera,” composed for the tiny original theater at Glyndebourne,
Cher Public