Philadelphia native Susan Gould has been writing professionally about classical music since her Barnard College years in New York. She has written for both American and European publications, primarily during fifteen years in Europe, and has done liner notes for recordings and program notes for opera companies and orchestras. Among those she has interviewed have been Sills, Tebaldi, Popp and Fleming; Bumbry, Ludwig, Fassbaender, and von Stade; del Monaco, Kraus and Pavarotti; Prey, Morris and Ramey; Muti, Abbado, Giulini, Sawallisch, and Eschenbach. Fluent in Italian, German and French, she has coached both student and professional singers in foreign-language diction since 1980.
DiDonato has always asked herself what happens to Charlotte after Werther’s suicide; now she pondered another young woman’s fate – her key to Winterreise was from the Mädchen’s viewpoint.
In Barbiere, the humor is constantly in the music So this staging was best when the director didn't impose anything but followed and respected the text and especially the music.
As part of its 85th season, Philadelphia's Academy of Vocal Arts presented a Le nozze di Figaro excellent in voices, singing, acting, conducting, orchestra, direction, sets and costumes.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Kevin Newbury see Candide as a coming-of-age story, placing it in their own high-school years, specifically 1992, making Westphalia a USA knockoff.
The pairing of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Riders to the Sea with Rene Orth’sEmpty the House worked perfectly and did absolute justice to these two despair-filled operas.
Almost every June from 1989 to 1999, I visited the charming town of Feldkirch, in the Vorarlberg region of Western Austria, for the annual Schubertiade, originally founded in 1976 by the great German baritone Hermann Prey.
