LA Opera opened their 30th season with a pairing of two of their most popular productions, both of which were initially staged by filmmakers not unfamiliar with the vagaries of our industry outpost here in Hollywoodland.
The Met’s planned premiere of Iolanta/Bluebeard’s Castle was cancelled due to the Great Blizzard That Wasn’t.
A Birnam Wood of Macbeths and Ladys has come traipsing through New York this year.
They say that Boston, despite many cultural distinctions, ain’t no opera town, and for some decades—generations?—this has been true. But tides of change will break, even on the shores of the Hub.
Coming as Peter Gelb did from the music industry, opera lovers hoped that he would display a more distinctive knack for casting and an improved talent pipeline than Joe Volpe offered during the waning years of his tenure.
Is the threnody, the lament over a beloved corpse, the oldest form of song? Surely it is among the oldest; one of the most widespread and stylistically various, millennia before opera was devised.
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…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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