I had every reason to think I’d love the New York Phil’s production of The Cunning Little Vixen as much as I did their staging of Le Grand Macabre with the same creative team.
“Subtract the magic and the flute from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and you’d think there’d be nothing. But an adaptation of this opera at the Lincoln Center Festival on Wednesday conjured a quiet enchantment.” [New York Post]
Here goes with the End of the Gods and the End of these Ring reviews: Götterdämmerung was more of a mixed bag than the other operas, but still left a powerful impression. This was where Zambello’s choice to steer clear of heavy spectacle was most evident to me. The cost in grandeur was offset by…
“Here, finally, is not merely the music on the Internet, but the music of the Internet…” Zachary Woolfe reacts to Nico Muhly‘s Two Boys in the New York Times.
Danish composer Poul Ruders, having been deeply moved by Lars von Trier’s 2000 film Dancer in the Dark, used his third commission from the Royal Danish Theatre to create a 75-minute opera based on this tragic story of a mother’s sacrifice to save her son from hereditary blindness. The result is a small masterpiece, renamed…
The centennial observances of Gustav Mahler’s death have not turned up a surfeit of newly discovered performances, probably because his symphonies and song cycles have long been a calling card for serious artists and record labels. Though the industry archives may be picked clean, the estates of dead musicians are at least starting to kick…
Sir Arthur Sullivan, the son of an Irish father and an Italian mother, studied Mendelssohn’s composition style in Leipzig. He was therefore, inevitably, the supreme English theater composer of his day, and his often Mozartean style of melody is not out of place in a bel canto festival. After all, in the fourteen operettas he…
“A singing crossbreed—a fox with human intelligence—stars in Leos Janacek’s opera, The Cunning Little Vixen. If only the New York Philharmonic’s semistaged performance Wednesday night were as successful a hybrid.” [New York Post]
If a new release of Verdi songs from Telos masquerades as a vanity project by Diana Damrau, the packaging takes the blame. Despite a starring place on the slip cover and top billing, Damrau sings less than a third of the tracks. It’s a pity, because she clearly found something of interest in the works…
Despite baby-steps over the years, America’s musical scene, especially opera, remains decidedly un-HIP. (HIP: “historically-informed performance,” also called “period performance.”) While European opera houses turn increasingly to “original instrument” orchestras and specialist singers for seventeenth and eighteenth century works, this rarely occurs in the US.
Sony Masterworks has released on CD
In what may qualify as the most unholy alliance of Peter Gelb‘s tenure at the Met so far, since February the “Live in HD” performances from 2009 of both Turandot and Aida issued by Decca have been available from… Target. Only Target. They are scheduled for international release this July. Up until recently there has…
Last year, La Cieca dedicated a blog post to a production of Salomé scheduled to take place in the Palais Opéra in Liège, with two surprising late career debuts by June Anderson as Salomé and Kammersängerin Mara Zampieri as Hérodiade. Now, a year later, I could not resist La Cieca’s request for a review, especially…
The setting: a dark plaza extending directly in front of a storied opera house. The time: just after a ho-hum revival of something Puccini. The crowd streams out, moderately satisfied but also far from bowled over. A group open to a proposition, you could say.
New York City Opera Education and the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture presented an evening of discussion, poetry and music from Scott Joplin’s opera, Treemonisha last night to an overflow crowd.
When a new production of Fidelio premiered at the Met in 1960, the opera had been absent from the repertoire since 1951, the post-war return of Kirsten Flagstad as a still effective Leonore and led by Bruno Walter. In the period between the two productions a new generation of singers had begun to make their…
“Time and tide wait for no one” pontificates Myrtle the barmaid, setting the tone for André Previn’s opera about fleeting romance but enduring love: Brief Encounter. Loosely based on the play Still Life by Noël Coward and the screenplay for the film Brief Encounter by Coward and David Lean, this opera (now on CD) tells…
One of the many pleasures of reviewing CDs and DVDs is the discovery of an unfamiliar composer whose works are original, fascinating, and moving. Such is the case with Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy, and his new Nonesuch CD of the concert piece “Gra agus Bas” (Love and Death) and a 6-song cycle entitled “That the Night…
Five decades before the Met turned to computer-assisted planks to help tell the story of Wagner’s Ring cycle, the company stirred controversy and comment with another staging of the tetralogy. General Manager Rudolf Bing imported a stark, abstract production from the Salzburg Festival in order to secure the services of Herbert von Karajan, who not…
When I was a kid growing up in Paris, there was a weekly TV broadcast of a theater play called Au Théatre Ce Soir that I loved. But that my father would rarely let me watch this show, because the plays were all were silly comedies, usually badly acted and filmed without any creativity or…
This mostly wonderful performance of Handel’s Theodora opened the 2009 Salzburg Festival in honor of the 250th anniversary of the composer’s death. Written at the beginning of the last decade of the composer’s life, it was a work that he held in very high regard even though he knew its subject matter would not excite. Only…
Other than binging on seven or eight Agatha Christie novels in seventh grade, I can’t recall ever again reading another mystery novel, or what they now call “crime fiction.” Perhaps it’s a coincidence but around that same age I attended my first opera and began subscribing to Opera News. Hence, Commissario Guido Brunetti, hero of…
Not everything a genius creates is … a work of genius. Y’know? Mozart, for example: Sure, he was a prodigy at four, and at ten, and even at fourteen, but did he actually compose anything spectacular before he turned, say, seventeen? I’m thinking of “Exultate, Jubilate,” if you want to know.
And now, live from Pittsburgh, one of La Cieca’s newest and nicest friends, Web 2.0’s answer to Louella Parsons, the inimitable Rowna Sutin with her video review of the Met’s production of Die Walküre!
Tell us: What’s your favorite Verdi performance?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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