The audience for The Met's first performance of La fanciulla del West this season arrived loaded for bear. Not only were they disappointed that Jonas Kaufmann was not singing (he's slated for shows starting 17th October), but their disappointment was heightened by the fact that tenor Yusif Eyvazov was singing.
Anna Netrebko scored an unmitigated success in her first Manon Lescaut at the Met, almost obliterating director Richard Eyre’s and designer Rob Howell’s misconceived production.
The return of the Met's Aida was a joyous celebration of the art form with excellent singers and orchestra doing what they do best against the backdrop of a traditional but effective staging.
A starrily cast performance of Puccini's early opera transcended the limitations of concert presentation to provide a very moving and musically rewarding account of the drama.
David McVicar's six-year old production of Il trovatore returns to the Met with a starry cast:a model of clarity and mood compared with the Met’s previous staging.
In Anna Bolena, Sondra Radvanovsky plays a queen who loses her crown. But she approaches a different coronation: as the first to play three of Donizetti's Tudor Queens at the Met.
Last night’s performance, the second after a serious casting face-lift held to that tradition, and was very well received despite its inherent flaws, thanks to some very fine singing.
Verdi’s Aida has been performed over 1,000 times at the Metropolitan Opera, making it the most commonly revived work after Puccini’s La bohème. Because Aida is so regularly programmed, I usually walk rather than run to see this opera.
This year’s revival of Mary Zimmerman’s La Sonnambula at the Met requires too much suspension of disbelief to seriously work, but it provides a fun and vibrant take on Bellini’s bel canto opera all the same. In the title role, Diana Damrau knocked it out of the park.
Chicago Lyric Opera's production of Madama Butterfly is open and airy, quiet in its theatrics, and the characters move with the grace and inevitability of shadows on the wall.
OK, opera fans: anyone out there tired of being confronted with provocative modern interpretations of beloved operas? If so, this Tosca production is just what the doctor ordered.Set, costume and direction all work together in this classic 1958 production to create the impression of Puccini’s turn-of-the-century masterpiece as it was originally intended.
In La rondine’s climactic scene, when Magda explains to her young lover Ruggero why she believes she must leave him, Puccini sets their exchange to one of the most hackneyed of all musical formulas: the cycle of fifths.
Love and death are the two basic ingredients of the standard opera plot, and the more tragedy involved from the first to the last, the more likely it is to spur composers to set it to magnificent music. Andrea Chénier is a textbook example of this although it is not anywhere near as popular as La traviata, Carmen or La bohème, and explicably so.
From time to time, audiences are presented with what I consider to be a rare event, a “dream” performer: one so convincing in his or her role that they become an ideal, establishing a standard to which all following interpretations will inevitably be compared – for example, Jacqueline du Pré’s interpretation of Elgar’s Cello Concerto has become a timeless benchmark.
In Tosca there's a real sense of Puccini being at home. Written shortly after La Bohème, when he was right at the height of his powers, Tosca is a story of love, jealousy and political turmoil, taking place in Rome, the same city in which it was premiered.
Otello, Verdi’s penultimate opera, is a tightly-wound setting of Shakespeare’s familiar tragedy. From the opening storm to the title character dying upon a kiss, it is more fragmentary and emotionally cool than his earlier work, an opera that tends to be more admired than loved.
If the painstaking recreation of Rome during the Napoleonic Wars is stripped away from the setting of Tosca. If choral numbers, sparing to begin with, are muted as distant drumbeats. If the title character is reinterpreted as a country girl with little artifice rather than a grand diva whose sheer confidence and sexuality prove irresistible to men.
Zwei kurzfristige Umbesetzungen und ein blasses Regiekonzept: Statt feuriger Saisoneröffnung mit Glamourfaktor loderte lediglich ein guter Repertoireabend.
Wie üblich beendete eine weiter konzertante Oper den Opernreigen der diesjährigen Salzburger Festspiele und in diesem Jahr war dabei Donizettis Attentäter-Drama Lucrezia Borgia zu erleben. Der Belcanto-Klassiker begeisterte mit mitreißenden Melodien und hervorragenden Solisten.
Una inteligente escena a cargo de Mario Gas, que recrea un rodaje hollywoodiense en la década de los años treinta, y una cuidada dirección de orquesta a cargo de Marco Armiliato han puesto en el escenario del Real una magnífica versión de Madama Butterfly, protagonizada por Ermonela Jaho la cual brilló en técnica y en actuación.
Ermonela Jaho bot an der Bayerischen Staatsoper in "La Traviata" einen fulminanten Ersatz für Sonya Yoncheva. Während das Ensemble mit starkem Auftritt überzeugte, hat die Inszenierung wenig zu erzählen.
Dans le cadre des Nuits de l'Orangerie, Anna Netrebko avait concocté le 4 juillet un programme d'opéra italien quasi en famille, à destination de ses nombreux fans : ceux-ci n'ont pas été déçus.
