A splendid new co-production of Puccini’s Tosca by Opéra de Montréal and the Cincinatti Opera broods on the terrible power of art, eros, and the state. "Compassion is the yin to power’s yang. Compassion cannot enact the relative freedom and justice of the “good” state...
Meirion Bowen writes: Peter Hall played a key role in rescuing the reputation as an opera composer of Sir Michael Tippett, dismissed and mocked in the 1950s as bafflingly over-complex and bizarrely eccentric. Hall’s direction of The Knot Garden in 1970 benefited above...
Regional music and arts festivals continue to proliferate, so I ask Padmore what it is that makes the four-day festival at Tetbury distinctive, and rewarding for a performer. He explains that he welcomes the opportunity to perform in a beautiful venue, the Georgian...
Unveiling her final program for Opera Queensland, Lindy Hume reflects on the transformative power of the art form – and the problems that plague it. When I hand the Opera Queensland reins to Patrick Nolan in November, it will mark my last outing as an artistic...
The Opéra of Montréal will open its 2017-18 season with an all-time classic: Tosca by Giacomo Puccini, a drama in three acts revolving around a love triangle. A painter (Mario Cavaradossi) and a singing diva (Tosca) are in love, but Scarpia, the chief of Roma’s Police...
Soprano who retired from operatic roles in 2009 says her voice ‘is in the past’ and reveals final concert was a year ago Dame Kiri Te Kanawa has announced her retirement from public performance after a career that has spanned almost five decades. The world-renowned...
The meek heroine of Jane Austen’s third novel reveals little of herself. It was in those absences that Jonathan Dove found inspiration for his chamber opera When I first read Mansfield Park, I heard music. That doesn’t always happen when I read, and it certainly...
San Diego, CA – Bass-baritone Greer Grimsley will replace tenor René Barbera for San Diego Opera’s One Amazing Night concert on May 5, 2018 at the Balboa Theatre. Greer will join soprano Lise Lindstrom for an evening of operatic favorites with the San Diego Symphony....
He put Rhinemaidens in fat suits, breathed life into Turnage’s Anna Nicole – now he is directing Covent Garden’s first new production of La Bohème for four decades. Richard Jones gives a rare interview Pink floorboards, yellow chairs, green cupboards and five...
Toronto, September 5, 2017 – Renowned conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin is the recipient of the 2017 Oskar Morawetz Award for Excellence in Music Performance. He will receive the award on Thursday, September 7 at 7:30 p.m., as he conducts the Orchestre Métropolitain’s...
‘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...
RETROSPECTIVE: of Opera Saratoga’s 2017 Summer Mainstage Season (July 1 through 16) – Verdi’s Falstaff; Grétry’s and Marmontel’s Zémire et Azor; Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock. The end-days of summer are high horse-racing season in Saratoga, with turfites and...