Can you imagine the Met--or any other major opera house--cutting the length of a new opera so commuters could make the last train? That’s what baritone Etienne Dupuis told me about the world premiere in Paris of Verdi’s DON CARLOS (1867).
Another work salvaged from this year’s Covid-aborted Prototype Festival has shown up in New York--at Brooklyn’s St.
If Friday night’s performance of Handel’s RODELINDA sometimes seemed like it was never going to end--it was quickly approaching the witching hour by the time the curtain calls were over, having started at 7:30--it certainly wasn’t the fault of the cast but Handel himself and librettist Nicola
The original title of the Sondheim-Laurents ANYONE CAN WHISTLE was THE NATIVES ARE RESTLESS, though the crowd at Carnegie Hall on Thursday for the MasterVoices concert performance of the trouble musical were hardly fidgety.
I flipped over Lise Davidsen when she made her Met debut in QUEEN OF SPADES—the voice, the acting, the overall subtlety--but I was still unprepared for the performance she gave as the Prima Donna who became Princess Ariadne of Crete in Strauss’s ARIADNE AUF NAXOS.
DON CARLOS--Verdi’s original French language version, for the first time at the Met, of the opera better known in these parts as the Italian DON CARLO--was as grim as its setting in the Spanish inquisition in the new David McVicar production introduced last night.
When this year’s PROTOTYPE Festival was put off for a year because of Covid concerns, some of the pieces went into mothballs.
It’s no secret that many of the standard repertoire’s most famous operas had troubled premieres but Beethoven’s FIDELIO had more than its share.
INTIMATE APPAREL appeared this week at LCT’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater, directed adroitly by Bartlett Sher, with a thoughtful libretto by Lynn Nottage based on her award-winning play and a ragtime-inflected score by composer Ricky Ian Gordon.
It took longer to read the notes for Joan Tower’s “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, No.
Ricky Ian Gordon and Michael Korie, in their new opera for New York City Opera and National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene, weren’t the only ones to be inspired by the famed 1962 novel THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS (IL GIARDINO DEI FINZI CONTINI) by Italian Giorgio Bassani.
Can we talk—about live opera in New York and elsewhere on the East Coast in the coming months?
When I saw the George Grosz-ish curtain that introduced us to the new Barlett Sher “Weimar-inspired” production of Verdi’s RIGOLETTO at the Met on New Year’s Eve, I was excited about what lay ahead.
What is there to say about Puccini’s TOSCA that hasn’t been said in the last hundred-plus years since its premiere in Rome (to echo the locations in the opera)? It is a marvel of brevity, with librettists Illica and Giacosa shaving locations, characters and action from the original play, written
Talk about ‘spoiler alerts,’ there was a big one for me early in the opera, EURYDICE, by Matthew Aucoin to a libretto that he and Sarah Ruhl fashioned from her play of the same name, which had its Met premiere last night.
“In Rigoletto we're dealing with abuse of women, male power, rape, murder.
It's Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1828 and the city's world-renowned anatomy schools are suffering from a cadaver shortage.
Though the classical music season is still young, it'll be tough for anything that lies ahead to compete with Friday night's performance at Carnegie Hall by Martha Argerich, who seemed to be having the time of her life, while showing total skill and control.
There are opera festivals and then there are OPERA FESTIVALS, but none that promise to be the equivalent of Opera Philadelphia's O17, which opens on September 14 for a 12-day run.
Audiences at the New York Philharmonic have been known to come for the soloists and then slip out for the symphony.
.jpg?format=auto&width=365)
