Zerbinetta is a music educator in the New York area with a background in music performance, theater studies, and history. She is particularly interested in Wagner, Baroque music, and, of course, Richard Strauss.
In his program note, conductor-director Iván Fischer describes his Mostly Mozart Festival production of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro as a staged concert. His agenda sounds serious: “This is my attempt to bring theater and music closer to each other, to create a new natural harmony.” He asks for a new era in opera production, seeking “organic unity” between music and theater.
Toshio Hosokawa’s opera Matsukaze is in many ways a model of modern cross-cultural creation. Premièred in Brussels in 2011, it sets a story from the traditional Japanese Noh theater in a more or less Western operatic framework. And the text is in German.
Alan Gilbert’s last few seasons at the New York Philharmonic have featured an opera in June. While previous efforts have featured elaborate staging, this year’s installment, Luigi Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero, was performed in concert. For this particular work, which was written for radio broadcast, this seems only appropriate.
Die Zauberflöte is a work whose outward simplicity masks internal complexity and even contradictions. Mozart’s music is childishly tuneful and yet reaches for the classically sublime; Emmanuel Schikaneder’s libretto alternates a magical quest story out of a German storybook with Masonic claptrap and secondhand Voltaire.
Henri Bergson famously defined comedy as “something mechanical encrusted on the living”. One suspects that Jacques Offenbach would have been a fan of this definition, and that Christopher Alden most certainly is.
New York is again lucky to host William Christie and Les Arts Florissants at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Their visits are always special, and it’s not just because the unique nature of their repertory – Baroque opera, usually French, which is neglected by most of New York’s major companies – nor the virtuosic ease with which they embody this otherwise-foreign idiom.
In recent seasons, the New York City Opera has largely limited itself to chamber operas. Its newest production marks a renewed ambition: Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto, a proto grand opera that ends with nothing less than the parting of the Red Sea.
Elina Garanča can always be counted on for a coolly polished performance. Her silvery mezzo is beautiful, even throughout her range, and impeccably on pitch. She is musically tasteful, and her sound has grown in recent years. But something often seems to be missing. While she’s too accomplished to call bland, her performances rarely show evidence of a beating heart.
Describing its new production of Francesco Cavalli’s 1668 opera Eliogabalo, the Gotham Chamber Opera compares the exploits of titular depraved Roman emperor Heliogabalus to Salome. There’s an obvious mistake here: Salome is an opera; Heliogabalus was a historical figure.
While musicals are normally outside the purview of major symphony orchestras, fans of Rodgers and Hammerstein can only be grateful for the New York Philharmonic’s beautiful staging of Carousel, currently onstage at Avery Fisher Hall.
Benjamin Britten’s 1954 opera The Turn of the Screw is a sensible choice for the New York City Opera: its chamber orchestration and emotional intimacy make it unsuitable for production by the Met Opera (against which every other company in town must define itself), and its claustrophobia would seem to offer a great opportunity for one of the company’s more innovative directors to create something
Yesterday I went to see a convoluted story about French revolutionaries, as belted out at top volume to serviceable but hardly creative ballads. No, I didn’t go to the Les misérables movie. I went to see Roberto Alagna in Opera Orchestra of New York’s concert presentation of Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chénier.
The prefab riffs of computer programs like GarageBand aren’t entirely new. As shown by the musicologist Robert Gjerdingen, many 18th- and early 19th-century composers used pedagogical materials as a basis for their compositions, “composing out” passages in creative ways. But this method is not something the ordinary listener is supposed to recognize.
In his 1995 book Text and Act, the musicologist Richard Taruskin wrote of the historically-informed performance movement, “the very recent concept of historical authenticity is implicitly projected back into historical periods that never knew it.
When Salzburg Festival director Alexander Pereira stepped onto the stage of the Großes Festspielhaus last night to announce that one of the cast members of La bohème was sick and unable to sing, he faced a chorus of hisses from the audience. Soprano Anna Netrebko, the festival’s biggest non-conductor star, was feeling fine (though as Mimì she would shortly die of consumption).
Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos was first performed in 1912, in a production directed by Max Reinhardt. Unlike the version usually seen today, this first Ariadne was a long-winded play-opera-ballet hybrid, incorporating a full production of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme with dances to incidental music by Strauss followed by the short opera.
Mozart wrote the opera seria Mitridate at the age of fifteen. The Bayerische Staatsoper’s clever and strangely beautiful production positions it as the work of a child, full of rebellious teenagers and projected scenery seemingly drawn from a primary school art class.
An old proverb names Munich as the northernmost city in Italy. As odd as this may seem, it makes some sense when considering the arches of the mock-Italian loggia in Odeonsplatz, modeled after the one in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence.
The Dresden Semperoper premiered a new production of Fidelio scarcely a month before the fall of East Germany. Much has changed in the intervening decade and a bit, but the Semperoper is still playing the same Fidelio. It doesn't take much knowledge of recent German history to understand why it was a sensation at the time.
“When I looked at you, I heard secret music,” says Salome in her monologue to the severed head of John the Baptist. Richard Strauss’s opera trades in the unseeable and the unknowable—from the range of metaphors applied to the moon to the nearly impossible staging of a ten-minute striptease performed by a dramatic soprano—which makes it unusually well suited to concert presentation.
