Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative, now in its 5th year, keeps the opera flame alight at the Kennedy Center during the long winter stretch between mainstage WNO productions.
Happily, this Rheingold, which returned to the Kennedy Center Saturday night to open the first of three complete cycles, has been shorn of its clumsier gestures.
Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s 1949 musicalization of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country has found a tentative home on the opera stage.
WNO premiered Better Gods, an hour-long work by composer Luna Pearl Woolf and librettist Caitlin Vincent on Friday evening.
Saturday’s Washington National Opera premiere of a new version of Philip Glass and Christopher Hampton’s Appomattox had everything going for it but the opera.
Since it’s put on in lavish productions at the biggest houses, sung by the biggest stars, since it wrings such a rich sound out of such a small band, and since the musical, formal and literary ambitions of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s great meta-opera are so very grand, it might be easy to…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
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