‘We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child’, begins the lyrical prose-poem by James Agee from which Barber drew his text, and which the composer said, ‘reminded me so...
The musical memory had been jolted by the waltzing strains of Roses from the South, the arrangement which had kept an otherwise forgotten operetta alive in the minds of Strauss’s contemporaries and subsequent audiences. Written in 1880, six years after Die Fledermaus,...
Here Gens presents extracts from Grand Opéra, reflecting her Tragodienne series of operatic arias. Visions is a stunner, rich and so rewarding that you want to rush out and hear each opera as a whole. This might be easier said than done, for some of the operas here...
Robin Ticciati conducted the Glyndebourne Chorus and Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, with Richard Croft as Tito, Alice Coote as Vitellia, Anna Stéphany as Sesto, Joelle Harvey as Servilia, Michèle Losier as Annio and Clive Bayley as Publio. Iain Rutherford’s...
Already before Torvaldo e Dorliska Rossini had three of his major comedies under his belt (La pietra del paragone, L’italiana in Algeri and Il turco in Italia) and two successful tragedies (Tancredi and Elisabetta). But Torvaldo e Dorliska is a dramma semiseria — a...
And there’s more recent stuff, much more, mostly multi channel video and sound installations around the world that I won’t see All of Mr. Kentridge’s disciplines come into play in his opera productions, providing this prolific artist a rich palate of expressive tools....
Handel opera productions are famously fraught with troubling decisions — which voices to use, which gender to use for which voices, which dances to use from which opera. Sometimes decisions are made for you. Like, for example, Handel had no choice but to use the...
BBC Radio 3’s Petroc Trelawny presents a concert in two parts on 17 September at 6pm at Cadogan Hall. The first half will include solo songs by Schubert, Schumann, Strauss and Quilter, followed by the Super Orchestra, conducted by Edward Gardner, accompanying Ailish...
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, one of three characters in S/G was in attendance at all four main stage productions of the weekend, and of course was on hand for Wang’s enchanting 60-minute opera about her unlikely friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia. The sold-out...
Francesca Zambello has had considerable success staging the piece for other notable companies, and as evidenced by this richly detailed production, she has honed her insights to a finely polished interpretation. Ms. Zambello occasionally likes to flavor her operas...
Someone seemed to have lost about thirty minutes of music. That does not mean the production was not exceedingly enjoyable. It most certainly was. But for Handel purists this opus may have seemed more like heavy hors d’oeuvres than a hearty main course. I am far from...
It is a welcome discovery, chock-full of soaring melodies and surging phrases that recount the moving tale of the six burghers of Calais willing to sacrifice their lives in order to save the city and citizens they love from isolation and destruction. Rodin...