This year’s revival of Andreas Homoki's production features excellent principals, choruses, and sublime orchestration under Fabio Luisi’s seasoned baton. The staging takes far fewer accolades.
Andreas Homoki’s new Zurich production capitalises on some quirky staging, but features superb voices in its principal roles and shows the best of the house’s joint choirs.
The use in the score of ancient musical instruments is what differentiates this work: pifferi, a lute, a “viola pomposa” give this work a distinctive flavour.
Fabio Luisi led The Cleveland Orchestra in Bruckner’s mighty Fourth Symphony, prefaced by a recently composed piano concerto by Sciarrino with Jonathan Biss.
The backstory doesn’t bode well: three fugitive criminals decide to found a city that will pander to society’s most vital needs: food, sex, warfare, and alcohol.
In a new production of Franz Lehár’s The Land of Smiles, the stoic Sou-Chong sets the melancholy tone of the operetta by singing “Smile despite your sorrows and a thousand.. aches and pains”.
That both the lead and a second key role were ill and couldn’t sing did not bode well, yet this performance of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera shook up the house nonetheless.
A refined Emperor Concerto from Igor Levit complemented a welcome return to the LSO by Fabio Luisi, exuding calm control and infectious enthusiasm in Brahms' second symphony.
Christian Spuck’s new ballet Messa da Requiem in Zurich, is a breathtakingly powerful achievement. But its profound impact is spurred by more than dance alone.
Don Giovanni is an opera which has as its title character a man who is an unrepentant womaniser, who ultimately receives his just reward in one of the most famous scenes in opera where he is consumed into the fires of hell.
Andreas Homoki’s new production of Vincenzo Bellini’s I puritani wows with a quartet of stellar vocalists, but its awkward staging and set design are a distinct disappointment.
The Met's new production of Manon Lescaut with Kristine Opolais and Roberto Alagna has great potential to be successful musically, but the production is mixed at best.
The Met’s revival of David McVicar’s year-old take on the perennial Verismo twins strikes out emotionally in Cavalleria rusticana but scores high in Pagliacci. Working on the same set by Rae Smith, flanked by the forbidding stone walls of the town church, Cavalleria is dark, dark, dark – the very picture of a poor, unhappy Sicilian hill town.
A charmingly-retro, Naïf Art production of Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore at Teatro alla Scala provided a refreshing departure from the minimal, post-apocalyptic devastation trends of modern stagecraft.
“Denmark is not all Lego and pastries!” quipped Nikolaj Znaider to the Albert Hall audience. Indeed not. It is the land of Carl Nielsen, whose 150th birthday was celebrated in a packed Prom given by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra.
The Met's new production of Cav and Pag boasted strong musical performance, but its production, despite some interesting ideas, was not completely successful.
A triumphant opening night was crowned by superb performances from Željko Lučić and Anna Netrebko as Macbeth and his Lady. But why the negative audience reaction to Adrian Noble's intelligent production?
The Festival della Valle d'Itria opened with a 20th century opera of some musical value, but of much more historical and philological interest for scholars.
Fabio Luisi and the LSO, vindicate magnificently Bruckner's first thoughts for his Eighth Symphony, and with Lise de la Salle create a splendidly multi-dimensional Mozart.
The Met’s playful production of Rossini’s great, loveable and busy La Cenerentola is back and in excellent hands. Joyce DiDonato's Cinderella, singing the role at the Met for the first time is perfect.
After a summer at the Blossom Music Center, it was good to have The Cleveland Orchestra back in its Severance Hall habitat for the opening on the 2013/14 concert season on Thursday evening.
The word Götterdämmerung contextually translated becomes “twilight of the gods”, and Thursday night’s story at the Met was indeed full of endings: the conclusion of the saga of the ring and the end of several lives, human and god alike.
All things considered, this Met Siegfried was a mixed affair. There was much to enjoy and much to marvel at; there were times where the performance felt as if it might achieve real lift-off, but it never quite achieved the sustained momentum of Friday's Walküre.
In last night’s performance of Die Walküre at the Met, Martina Serafin as Sieglinde and Simon O’Neill as Siegmund drew us completely into the process of two people falling into illicit love.
Quite simply, it’s the largest scale event in all of opera. With 18 hours of music in a 3,800 seat house, Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Met is a giant, lavish undertaking – all starting with that famous E flat chord: starting from the quietest of pianissimo double bass notes and building for nearly four minutes before it explodes into the melody of the Rhinemaidens.
