Katherine Syer teaches at the Herb Alpert School of Music at the University of California, Los Angeles. Many of her published articles and books focus on Wagner’s dramatic art. Her current research and work as a Dramaturg focus on contemporary production practices, spanning spoken and lyric theatre genres.
A highly satisfying level of polish in La Monnaie's stream in which one recognizes a precisely executed live performance at its core – one that would be thrilling to experience in person.
There’s no doubt that Mélisande endeavours to escape past troubles when she first appears in Barrie Kosky’s production of Debussy’s opera, yet Nadja Mchantaf is no reticent, wispy maiden. Every vocal and physical gesture – always precise and penetrating – displays an atypically forthright quest for vitality, something that Arkel’s chauvinistic world does not readily offer.
Franz Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten (The Branded One) is an unsettling work given the storyline’s background of abduction and clandestine sexual abuse. Calixto Bieito, as expected, eschews ambiguity regarding what goes on behind the scenes, and casts even the titular cripple Alviano Salvago in a damning light.
Kevin Puts effectively shapes the time-traveling structure with distinctive sound worlds as thirty dramatic vignettes unfold across a little more than an hour and a half.
Dead Man Walking is currently the most frequently performed contemporary American opera. Joel Ivany's staging, first mounted in Vancouver, opened recently at Minnesota Opera just days after the opera's Spanish première in Madrid.
David Pountney's new production of Die Walkürefor the Lyric Opera of Chicago incisively charts the tectonic shift of control over the future from Wotan to Brünnhilde.
Sir David McVicar's production of Tristan und Isolde premiered at the Wiener Staatsoper in 2013, and was then recognized as a friendly platform for singers. Here it is freshly revived with a new cast.
This double cast, nine-day revival of Vadim Milkov's staging of Pique Dame offers a relatively straight reading of Tchaikovsky's opera about the obsessive Pushkin-based character Herman. Embracing the opera's choral and dance passages, spectacle and pageantry are paramount; the drama's surreal and more nuanced dimensions could have been better profiled.
At the Theater an der Wien, director Mariame Clément and novelist Lucy Wadham have crafted innovative material that brings the old-fashioned lyrics to life in a coherent and contemporary dramatic setting.
From page to stage, the creation of a new opera often takes years. This is true of Alma Deutscher's first full-length opera Cinderella, so the fact that she has completed this ambitious project at the age of eleven is all the more remarkable.
