Verdi's fifth opera can be considered a blueprint for Trovatore and deserves a more regular place in the repertoire, but it needs more sincere advocacy than Bechtolf is prepared to grant.
Santa Fe Opera presented Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette in Stephen Lawless’ mid 19th-century staging, a co-production with Barcelona's Liceu. Before the overture, General Director Charles MacKay came onstage to announce that Stephen Costello was ill and would be replaced by Joshua Guerrero, a graduate of the Los Angeles Opera Young Artist Program.
This is a well-oiled operatic machine, with all of the cogs whirring. Act I's garret crackles and pops in a slick stream of gags both familiar and new.
In 1984, I went to Covent Garden to see Andrei Serban's production of Turandot and was bewitched. Thirty years, fifteen revivals and a wealth of opera-going later, I was bewitched all over again by Nicola Luisotti's rendering of the score.
If you were to measure the potency of this afternoon’s concert of Verdi’s Requiem by the sheer number of grown men weeping at the end, I’d say it was an unparalleled success. In fact, after that grandiose musical testament, operatic in scope, the applause was nearly endless and every soul in the hall rose to stand.
A glittering high society romance. A sordid tale of a prostitute born in the gutter and dying alone and painfully. A bel canto charmer, packed with glorious tunes. A scathing attack on Victorian sexual hypocrisy. Verdi's La Traviata is all of these things: find in it what you will.Richard Eyre's production for the Royal Opera is a hardy old soldier.
In 1971, the thirty year-old Placido Domingo made his Covent Garden début as Cavaradossi in Puccini's Tosca and in the intervening forty years, he has given two hundred and thirty performances in more than twenty-five roles for Royal Opera House audiences.
Some operagoers contend that Carmen, the fatalistic gypsy doomed to die, is unlikable. She antagonizes other women at the cigarette factory. She seduces men with abandon. She makes an inexperienced corporal of the guard fall for her, manipulates him into abandoning his military career for a life of smuggling, and then heartlessly turns him out like a pesky stray.
Opera Company of Philadelphia (OCP) reached into the Philadelphia community with its remake of Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet, the second of five shows in the 2010-11 season. In his OCP debut, Italian director Manfred Schweigkofler gave the company a chance to recast a Renaissance-era tale of two Italian families bearing ancient and deadly grudges as warring fashion houses in 21st century Verona.
, Gerard Finley (Athanaël, singing).jpg "David Pittsinger (Polémon, left), Gerard Finley (Athanaël, singing) © Chris Lee | Metropolitan Opera")
