When is a DVD recording of a performance without audience more desirable than a CD? Perhaps when the greatest performer of Schubert’s Winterreise cycle is the singer in this DVD. Watching Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau perform with Alfred Brendel at the piano is to experience the intensity and variety of the cycle in a more personal setting,…
Morris dancing returns to the Met for a revival of Orfeo, and our own JJ is there to review it. [New York Post]
A documentary about the heldentenor Max Lorenz would seem to be an ideal prism through which to examine the moral ambiguities and trade-offs of artistic life in the Third Reich. The preeminent Siegfried, Tristan and Tannhauser of the Nazi era was considered so essential to the success of Bayreuth that Winifred Wagner told Hitler that…
Glyndebourne’s release of a live Rosenkavalier from 1965 longs to be loved and cherished by listeners. Featuring a thrilling Traumcast composed of Montserrat Caballé, Otto Edelmann, Teresa Zylis-Gara, and Edith Mathis, one would certainly expect it to deserve much praise and admiration. The sound quality is, however, a stunning disappointment.
Sometimes it seems as though DVDs are released just for the sake of filling a hole in the catalogue. Considering the lack of anything truly distinctive in this 2007 production of Verdi’s La forza del destino from the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, that would certainly seem to be the case here. (If anyone is wondering, the…
You may recall, cher public, that a few weeks ago La Cieca challenged you to identify the blurbs for that new picture book (James Levine: 40 Years at The Metropolitan Opera, and yes, it’s available on Amazon!) Where was I, oh, yes. Anyway, La Cieca supplied three of the back cover blurbs and you were…
“ll y avait pourtant parmi ce public de première des spectateurs moins convaincus de la pertinence de l’énorme machine de scène créée par l’équipe de Lepage. La chanteuse Patti Smith, croisée au deuxième entracte, la trouvait lourde et encombrante et lui imputait la responsabilité des trébuchements de Deborah Voigt, qui incarne Brünnhilde, la Walkyrie.” [La…
It’s Holy Week (as I write) and I just received this new CD from our Doyenne. Good timing. For the concert stage (and the opera house), I think of Pergolesi as essentially a one-hit wonder (each). I won’t pretend to know his opera buffa, La Serva Padrona, let alone hide the fact that I drove right…
In this new Decca DVD of Tosca we find a highly intellectual, even fascinating staging at odds with the visceral nature of the original melodrama but one that inspires its cast to great heights. Robert Carsen is a clever producer with an elegant visual palette. He employs the same directorial strategy as his famous Mefistofele…
“Director Robert Lepage’s obsession with eye-popping visuals showed little concern for the work’s complex intellectual and moral dimensions.” [New York Post]
David McVicar’s ravishingly lurid 2008 production of Strauss’s Salome for the Royal Opera House Covent Garden has been issued as an HD-filmed DVD from Opus Arte. Now, Strauss’s music is ravishingly lurid on its own, so I came to this production, which claims as a visual source reference the Pasolini film Salo, The 120 Days…
The word traditional, when used to describe opera productions can imply a certain setting, costuming, stage action, or even overall dramatic conception (or lack thereof). Tradition at its best can provide a straightforward backdrop for the genius of a work to unfold, and at its worst weigh an opera down with outdated and vapid conventions.…
Die Zauberflöte is a perennial favorite with audiences, and modern productions have attracted top singers and production teams. Yet every production struggles with the performance text, particularly with the issues of race and sex. The dreams of the Enlightenment may be lovely, but the social mores of their dreamers have not aged gracefully. Despite a…
Since a number of parterre’s better reviewers have recently left the fold (for the happiest of reasons, to be sure!) La Cieca is looking for a new crop of writers to critique the latest DVD and CD releases. If you’d like to audition for a spot, drop an email to your doyenne including a shipping…
“Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, about a bullied soldier’s descent into madness, is one of the grimmer operas around. Yet it was cause for jubilation Wednesday night when Met music director James Levine finally returned to the podium.” [New York Post]
In 1967, Rolf Liebermann , General Manager of the Hamburg State Operas, undertook to produce 13 operas for television, securing the Hamburg-based film and television company Polyphon Film und Fernsehgesellschaft to record the productions with the original Hamburg casts. The director Joachim Hess adapted the stage productions for the requirements of television. The second of…
BelAir Classiques has released a DVD of a 2007 production of Die Walküre, filmed in HD at the Festival D’Aix en Provence, a co-production with Osterfestspiele Salzburg. While not an unwelcome addition to the numerous DVDs available of this work, it is certainly not an essential one. This production is just not bad enough to…
We see the excited crowd at the Arena di Verona, the ancient structure lit by enormous stadium lights, the passing of candlelight through the audience, and tourists snapping pictures. The flash bulbs keep popping, right through the performance. And as the opera unfolds, there is that feeling of watching a tired Broadway cast walk through…
“Take a sexy comedy, add Rossini’s scrumptious melodies, then fold in world-class singers and a Tony-winning director. Now pray it doesn’t turn out like the sodden soufflé that is the Met’s new Le Comte Ory.” Our own JJ is in a severe mood in today’s New York Post.
Directors love directing Wagner, or rather, they love directing their versions of Wagner. They don’t seem to like the operas very much. We all know what we’re going to see if we travel to Bayreuth or Berlin or Stuttgart for an evening: the regietheater world of concept grafted over concept grafted over concept with the…
Pornography being the seminal [sic] art form of our time, through which every other art is interpreted (I lament this, but what can you do?), and opera being in one of its periodic up-cycles, new ones being composed and premiered, old ones being dusted off for re-use, and stage directors feeling impelled, as they do,…
Opera is about the possibility of transformation. An unassuming woman can walk in through the theater’s stage door and emerge on stage as fiery princess capable of making the walls rattle. Alas, these transformations inevitably fail to stick. Every Turandot must hang up her crown; every Elektra must put down her ax one final time.…
“The first rule of gambling is: You win some, you lose some. Still, it’s heartbreaking that on Friday at the Met, an opera about a compulsive gambler, The Queen of Spades, barely broke even.” Our own JJ (not pictured) knows when to fold them in the New York Post. (Photo: Marty Sohl / Metropolitan Opera)
Among symbolic classical tropes, one of my favorites (perhaps because only another classicist will understand it) is Nessus’ Shirt, an emblem of glory (a promotion, say, or an expensive luxury) that destroys you.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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