The 1965 season was a time of big changes at the Vienna State Opera.
Could Marek Janowski do for Wagner what the early music movement did for the Baroque and Classical repertory?
A Dutch-speaking parterrian has graciously translated the interview with Piotr Beczala that’s been causing such a foofaraw lately.
A new CD
features the ten most gorgeous minutes recorded by a tenor in Wagner since World War II.
Midway through his traversal of Wagner’s 10 mature operas for PentaTone, we’ve learned this about Marek Janowski:
“Is a work an opera simply because its creators choose to call it one?”
Camille Saint-Saëns was such a brilliant, facile musician that pals like Wagner and Liszt felt a distinct schadenfreude when he suffered composer’s block.
This Hans Neuenfels staging for the Bayreuth Festival caused quite a stir at its 2010 premiere, but now, with time and distance, how radical is the production?
Richard Wagner believed the key to any legend was contrasting the supernatural with human nature, and showing how the combination had no chance of enduring. In Lohengrin, the title’s character’s insistence on unconditional love and trust collide with the conditional expectations of the real world. The challenge is capturing the tale’s somber majesty without losing…
In the liner notes to his new Wagner CD, Rene Pape opines that performing the master’s work isn’t terribly different than performing Mozart. Both composers require singers to sustain a melodic line, manipulate vowels at the right moments and deploy dynamic gradations for dramatic effect. Call it German bel canto or natural speech, just don’t…
“Hey the line forms, on the right dear / Now that Macheath’s back in town / You’d better lock your doors, and call the law / Because Macheath’s back in town.” So concludes Marc Blitzstein’s famous English translation of the song that opens Die Dreigroschenoper.
I have been tossing and turning over La Cieca’s most recent assignment for me: a CD of Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer based on a performance live in concert from November 13, 2010. The anxiety mainly stems from the fact that, horror to say, I am no Wagnerite. I know that sect of opera buffs has…
Hans Neuenfels‘ new staging of Lohengrin for Bayreuth is the grimmest version of this work I’ve seen. Not that this opera is all bright lights and lollipops, but he gave us a particularly dark take on the work, motivated, in part, by Wagner’s writings at the time of the opera’s composition.
The moral of Lohengrin is clearly set out: Don’t talk on your wedding night. Even more important, don’t sing. Happily, at Lyric Opera of Chicago, Johan Botha in the title role and Amber Wagner as Elsa of Brabant ignored this advice.
In the summer of 2007, at the height of the heated speculation and public debates over who would succeed Wolfgang Wagner as the head of the Bayreuth Festival, his daughter, Katharina Wagner presented a new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at the festival, replacing the mind-numbingly boring one by her father (his third at…
Our Own Ercole Farnese discovered and translated this interview in La Stampa with Jonas Kaufmann, in which the tenor discusses his “his idolatrous success with ladies and gay men, four fifths of the opera-goers.”
Once again, La Cieca can do no better than to quote the ineffable BAB, who says, “The beauty of the Saturday afternoon Chats this summer has been that everyone picks what they want and then we compare notes with what’s happening elsewhere. Ordinarily I make no recommendations, but I have decided to do things differently…
The first opera to be performed in the 21st century at the Metropolitan Opera, thankfully after the lack of total destruction from the Y2K bug, was the recently premiered The Great Gatsby by John Harbison. Commissioned to mark James Levine’s 25th anniversary with the company, the recording of this New Year’s Day broadcast is now…
This live CD of Wagner orchestral excerpts and the Wesendonck Lieder is noteworthy for the conducting of Franz Welser-Most and the truly remarkable playing of The Cleveland Orchestra. I have seldom heard an ensemble sound so beautiful on CD. The strings shimmer like satin, the reeds are clean and clear, the brass warm and burnished with…
La Cieca must say that, for a chick, Katharina Wagner sure doesn’t talk much. But perhaps her reticence is something of a blessing, since it prevents her from spouting such facile generalizations as “…’Die Meistersinger,’ Hitler’s favorite Wagner opera.”
I’d never actually seen a production of Lohengrin before I agreed to review a new Decca DVD of Richard Jones‘s staging for the Bayerische Staastoper, starring Jonas Kaufmann, so I hope I’ve got this right: It’s about this architect named Elsa, who lives in an Orwellian steampunk Germany that has videocamera technology but still dresses like…
Boy, this review practically writes itself. I’ve heard Jonas Kaufmann’s Alfredo live and was duly impressed, so I was thrilled to have the opportunity to review this recording. All I can say about Jonas Kaufmann: Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven & Wagner (Decca 4781463), to be released April 6, 2010, is that it went straight to both…
La Cieca is delighted to begin a new series on parterre.com dedicated to the fretting, brooding and dithering of the Wazier of the Worriers, Anthony Tommasini. Our first examples (of many) follow the jump.
First things first: how are the clothes? Well, there’s enough leather to fill The Eagle ten times over, and there’s definitely fodder for intermission conversation: an adorable tweedy, puffy coat for Uldino; the pimped-out spiky bike helmet with the L.E.D. lights for Attila; all the L.E.D. lights in fact, like the ones that outline Ezio’s…
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.