Decca has released a remarkable performance of Massenet’s great romantic tragedy Werther. Filmed live in January 2010, this performance stands out primarily for the great singing and dramatic vitality of the principals, particularly the remarkable Werther of Jonas Kaufmann. It is rare to hear a tenor voice with this much heft, body and color phrase…
Ioan Holender was General Manager of the Wiener Staatsoper for nineteen years, the longest anyone has held this post, and the august institution honored him with the gala to end all galas in the final days of his administration. With the goal of commemorating each of the 40 new productions premiered at the Staatsoper during…
“This year may go down as one filled with surprises at the Met, kicking off with an unexpected role for a familiar tenor and a dazzling debut for a budding superstar.” [New York Post] (Photo: Ken Howard / Metropolitan Opera)
In the process of unearthing forgotten musical works, sometimes we stumble across a gem. World War II saw an entire generation of European composers forced into internment or diaspora, and their works are only slowly being rescued from obscurity. In a recent DVD release from the LA Opera, a part their Recovered Voices series, we…
Willy Decker’s Traviata has garnered praise from critics and audiences alike in the week since its Metropolitan premiere, but (as was to be expected) this praise comes over the complaints of a select few traditionalists, a handful of lonely boos amid the mostly enthusiastic applause. Their objection (as usual) is that Decker’s production betrays the…
“Mr. Decker joined Acts II, III and IV by creating a tableau at the end of each act that dissolved into the beginning of the next. It was theatrically effective, but made for a long sit for the audience.” This, and a whole lot of other hogwash, in The Wall Street Journal.
“Unveiling a new La Traviata Friday night to a starry audience including Natalie Portman and Vanessa Redgrave, the Met triumphed with the most moving and exciting Verdi production in years.” [New York Post] / Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera
First-time novelist Matthew Gallaway’s ardent love for Tristan and Isolde gushes through every page of The Metropolis Case. According to Gallaway, Tristan is the highest expression of human art, and the book functions effectively as the ultimate initiator in the cult of Wagner. The novel opens with a lengthy discussion of the opera in the…
No programs for last night’s Fanciulla, just someone had worked overtime on the copier to give us a cast list and plot summary. If no delivery for the glossy, fully 3k people there, just slight slip and slide on the Plaza enough to keep me gripping the alpenstock. (A weapon of Individual Destruction, permitted by…
As we look forward to New Year’s Eve and to the gala opening of Willy Decker’s La Traviata at the Met, it seems fitting to look back—by way of the official, live, DVD recording of the production’s sensational world premiere at the Salzburg Festival in 2005—to get some sense of what’s behind all the hype.…
In 1804, E.T.A. Hoffmann became acquainted with Schlegel’s translations of Spanish plays in Spanisches Theater. During an illness in 1807, he returned to the Schlegel and discovered Calderon’s Die Scharpe und die Blume, finding it an ideal operatic subject. He composed the opera in Warsaw and Berlin, and began seeking a theatre that would present…
Long ago, in a galaxy far away – I mean, the era before supertitles became common in opera houses around the world – you could always tell the text-mad opera fan. He was the one who arrived early to the theater and spent the remaining minutes to curtain hunched over his libretto booklet, trying to…
It’s a sad story, really. Debussy and Maeterlinck had what the kids would call Major Drama over who was to sing Melisande (Mary Garden vs. the person you’ve never heard of) and so Maeterlinck didn’t see Pelleas until years after Debussy had died, so he never got to be like “word!” or, I suppose, “mot!”
If I had been handed Clari’s score without being told the name of the composer, I might have thought it was a lost Rossini opera, albeit a minor one. I would have probably assigned it to the early period of Rossini’s career, because it shows more similarities with works like La pietra del paragone and…
Arthaus Musik has released on DVD a superb 1963 “Historical Studio Production” of Der Konsul, a German language filmed version of Menotti’s 1950 opera, The Consul. It is a dark, harrowing vision of Menotti’s “denunciation of all forms of tyranny”, beautifully sung, superbly acted, and directed with an almost film noir/expressionistic style by Rudolph Cartier.…
“The American Way of Life, lightly satirized, lies at the heart of our production: it is an adventure that takes place somewhere between Wall Street and Hollywood.” Nikolaus Lehnhoff, as can be surmised from these liner notes, makes full use of stereotypically “American” imagery throughout his production of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West: Wall Street…
New York Festival of Song’s Manning the Canon: Songs of Gay Life is a delightfully lighthearted, deeply personal, and colorful recital made of equal parts sex, camp, melancholy, and tenderness. Steven Blier‘s wide-ranging program consists of five sets of songs, each meant to evoke, as per his program notes, “a quintessential moment of a gay…
The interpretation of Carmen by Latvian mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca has been much debated, many finding her cold and remote, others admiring her subtly smoldering quality. A new Deutsche Grammophon DVD documenting the Met’s January 16, 2010 performances offers us an opportunity to examine the gypsy in close-up. This is certainly not the lusty, passionate, mercurial Carmen…
Don Carlo is truly a grand opera, Verdi’s biggest, no matter if it’s the four or five act version. It is a bitch.
Chicago’s opera community has been abuzz about this production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera ever since the 2010-11 Lyric Opera season was announced. A sumptuous production owned by San Francisco opera, major female stars, a solid male cast of experienced Verdians, and stage direction by the legendary Renata Scotto—what more could one ask?
Very few things intrigue me as much as analyzing belcanto operas, comparing their several versions and examining the composers’ second thoughts, modifications and revisions that, willingly or unwillingly, they made to their scores. I was already salivating when I heard that the Teatro Comunale di Bologna was going to perform Vincenzo Bellini’s I Puritani in…
Which cord does one snip to make a castrato? So goes a running joke in The Last Castrato by Guy Fredrick Glass, a play about Alessandro Moreschi, the last living castrato and the only one ever recorded. Much of his career was spent as the first soprano of the Sistine Chapel Choir, both because of…
I attend the opera intent on enjoying myself. If the music is not my favorite, there is always something to like, be it a colleague’s individual performance, the discovery of a newcomer, nifty stagecraft or costumes, observing the movement skills of the various singers, or in worst-case scenarios, observing the audience’s boredom, carefully notating the…
The annual Richard Tucker gala came and went at Avery Fisher Hall with the usual quota of gaffes, wardrobe malfunctions, no-shows, too-much-shows, substitutions and surprise guests (well, guest). And sandwiched between the routine, the egocentric and the just plain dull were moments of true dementia, the moments that we melomanes live and die for. Most…
Tell us: What’s your favorite Verdi performance?
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