According to Our Own JJ, there was skating on the ramparts of Seville last Thursday night. [New York Post]
Although billed as “I Love Lucy the opera”, New York City Opera’s production of Richard Strauss’s conversation-piece Intermezzo offers far more emotional depth than the much-loved 1950s sitcom. Yet ironically, in key moments it lacks the necessary heart which Lucy had in spades.
Just in time for the holidays, Juan Diego Flórez releases the de rigueur Christmas album every internationally renowned opera star seems to make. Entitled Santo, this CD, like most others of its ilk, is pleasantly entertaining. However, Flórez eschews a straight Christmas album for one composed of a mix of religious standards, carols and eclectic…
“…incest, gay baiting, draft dodging and drunken driving… it’s hard not to giggle!” Our Own JJ reviews the NYCO’s premiere of A Quiet Place in the New York Post.
In 1890 Cavalleria rusticana had taken the whole world by storm and in the next decade or so, hordes of composers, willing or unwillingly, jumped on the Verismo bandwagon. La navarraise (1894) is generally considered Jules Massenet’s homage to the genre, and for a long time the two works were often performed together. Emma Calvé,…
Lyric Opera of Chicago has entrusted their new Macbeth to Barbara Gaines, Artistic Director of the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, whose work can be frustratingly inconsistent. She has directed the finest Troilus and Cressida and the finest King Lear that I have ever seen. Yet her recent work has been filled with wretched excess and effects…
In Measha Brueggergosman‘s newest DG release, “Night Songs…” Oh… sorry! That was Renée Fleming‘s beautiful 2001 Decca release of similar (occasionally overlapping) material. Let me try that again. “In the Still of Night…” Oh… sorry! That was Anna Netrebko‘s voluptuous CD of Russian songs released earlier this year.
I tried so hard to like Elina Garanca’s Habanera, an album of songs and arias about gypsies, but it was really difficult. I would’ve been able write this review earlier and quicker if I could just make myself like the album a lot, or even dislike it so that I could rail against the project…
The relative obscurity of Karol Szymanowski‘s Krol Roger (King Roger, 1924) can only be blamed on its being in Polish. The music is often as thrilling as anything by Janácek or Bartók, and the libretto by Jaroslow Iwaszkiewicz (heavily adapted by the composer) is as full of provocative philosophical ideas as operas by those composers…
“Saturday night’s Met debut of Vittorio Grigolo in La Boheme was promising enough to suggest the tenor may one day live up to his own hype.” [New York Post]
“So, how is this new Pavarotti?” or, “This young tenor, what’s his name, I saw him on the morning show, is he any good?” When people who have never set foot inside an opera house—and know Maria Callas chiefly as the woman Aristotle Onassis dumped for Jacqueline Kennedy—start asking me such questions, then I…
Simpler can be better, as Pocket Opera of New York demonstrated in the back of the Bechstein Showroom on Wednesday evening for their double bill of Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges and Debussy’s La chute de la maison Usher. When I heard these operas would be presented in English with piano accompaniment, I was initially…
Performance Lab 115‘s adaptation of the first two parts of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, simply titled The Ring Cycle: [Parts 1+2], is a clever, well thought-out, if not entirely successful attempt to mythologize Wagner’s epic within the framework of 1980’s professional wrestling.
“Playthings of the Gods: Essential Myths,” the Vertical Player Repertory’s evening of Monteverdi, Britten and Milhaud, heard October 8, was a satisfying treat. The soloists were excellent, although the venue, Christ Church Cobble Hill, had overwhelmingly boomy acoustics and robbed the audience of any nuance in the voices.
Congratulations to Nicola Lischi, of the younger generation of critics the one with the best developed… knowledge of Italian opera, for his first review on Opera Brittania.
“Fricka, queen of the gods, modeled one of Mamie Eisenhower’s old cocktail dresses; trickster god Loge rocked a Gary Glitter jumpsuit, and the thieving dwarf Alberich sported MC Hammer pants.” Our Own JJ breaks it down. [New York Post]
Great expectations awaited the Met Opera’s new production of Das Rheingold, staged by the ambitious Canadian director Robert Lepage, and rightly so. With a 45-ton set carrying a $16 million price tag, a world-renowned cast, and maestro James Levine celebrating his 40th anniversary on the podium, who wouldn’t be on the edge of his seat as…
Crossing the Plaza and seeing two thousand chairs gleaming in the gloaming with rain slick and thoughts of the evening that might have been for many. Past the ticket takers and the buzz of voices, the gawkers lined up on the stairs to see the celebs, I wend my way through and up and up.…
According to Mary Garden’s autobiography, Claude Debussy first encountered the Scottish-born diva at the Opéra Comique. After rehearsing her at the piano in a few scenes from his newly completed opera, Debussy said to Garden: “To think that you had to come from the cold far North to create my Mélisande.” He then turned to…
Chandos’ Opera In English series continues with a new two-disc set of Strauss’ much-admired Ariadne on Naxos, with the Hofmannsthal libretto translated by Christopher Cowell. Sir Richard Armstrong conducts the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and a starry if uneven cast led by Christine Brewer in the title role. This reviewer has never fully warmed to the…
Okay, it wasn’t Sister Act all the way, but in the middle of Acts IV and V, ENO’s new production of Gounod’s Faust (September 18) almost turned me into a straight Catholic Republican conservative. But we’ll get to the reason why a bit later.
An unlikely but adept English-language vocal stylist, Cecilia Bartoli, led the cast of a revival of the 2007 Zurich staging of Handel’s Semele, transferred to the Theater an der Wien for a short run. Director Robert Carsen takes an occasional liberty: Juno and Jupiter emerge as British royals, for instance, she a wellie-wearer and devotee…
When Hans Von Bülow joked that Rienzi was Meyerbeer’s best opera, he was not very far off the mark. In fact, Rienzi, der Letze der Tribunen, Wagner’s third opera, has all the traits of a typical “grand opéra”: it is divided in five acts, features a historical character or situation, makes large use of the…
Les Troyens is one of those things, or often two of those things, that should be a big event or it practically needn’t happen at all.* The keynote is grandiosity in the best way, from the subject to the musical demands (let’s include the implicit challenge of one singer performing both Cassandre and Didon—not because…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
×
Sign up for Parterre’s free newsletter.
Exclusive opera reviews, commentary, and top reads
delivered to your email weekly…ish.