A.J. Goldmann on the Salzburg Festival’s revolving doors, both in its administration and in its delectable production of Il viaggio a Reims.
Théâtre de l’Athénée Louis-Jouvet mounts a raucous production of Hervé’s Le petit Faust.
Offenbach‘s Robinson Crusoé is salvaged from obscurity.
Les Brigands at the Paris Opera is an expensive joke that never lands
June is long gone. It was truly a month of excellence and exuberance here in San Francisco, coupled with cozy and inviting weather, as if to make up for the extended winter.
No, we don’t really need another “Orpheus” opera. Or, rather, we don’t need this one.
We live in a time of open-season for jokes on ancient myths, mixing and matching, sometimes with great success, as The Book of Mormon and Hadestown demonstrate.
Trove Thursday wades into the murky musicological waters of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann..
I got quite a surprise when I opened the latest packet of goodies from La Cieca – a DVD of Orphée aux Enfers, but in German as Orpheus in der Unterwelt.
The best joke in Offenbach’s delicious Orphée aux Enfers is the opening premise: Orphée and Eurydice are miserably married, due to her utter boredom with his old-fashioned music.
Opera and comedy can be a very awkward match. Despite the number of comic operas in the standard rep, most opera fans don’t seek out a local production of, say, Die Entführung aus dem Serail because they need a giggle and 30 Rock is a repeat that night. And so the 1997 Opéra National de…
For those of us newly accustomed to watching The Met: Live in HD cinecasts and similar events in our neighborhood theaters, it is easy to forget that opera as cinema was once a very different experience. Ritter Blaubart, one in a series of seven films by Walter Felsenstein recently released on DVD, shows us the…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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