The team of soloists, the chorus and the orchestra, under the baton of Philippe Auguin, powerfully conveyed the spectacular qualities of Verdi's Don Carlo.
David Pountney's new production of Die Walkürefor the Lyric Opera of Chicago incisively charts the tectonic shift of control over the future from Wotan to Brünnhilde.
Mozart's Idomeneo proved to be a challenge for some of the soloists initially but the superb orchestra under James Levine brought about a successful opening evening at the Met.
The Metropolitan Opera's new produdtion of Rusalka fails to explore a deeper complexity of the fairy tale, although a strong ensemble of singers and the superb Met Orchestra make it a musically compelling performance.
Conductor Susanna Mälkki, in her Met Opera debut, led the Met Opera Orchestra in a limber performance of Ms Saariaho's gorgeous music, the first woman-authored score to be heard at the Met in 113 years.
In spite of some questionable staging, Lyric Opera of Chicago opened its Ring cycle on a strong note with a stellar cast, notably featuring Eric Owens’ role debut as Wotan.
The late director Patrice Chereau's last work, Elektra, was brilliantly realized at the Met, with special credit to conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and soprano Nina Stemme.
New York Philharmonic under its music director Alan Gilbert delivered an impressive performance of Verdi's famous Requiem, with an excellent ensemble of soloists and chorus.
The marriage between performers and score here is perfect, because Gershwin’s text-setting is near-miraculous, somehow every word is clear and seems to be naturally inflected by the curvature of the musical line.
The Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, in collaboration with Peter Sellars, brings their superb dramatic performance of Bach's St Matthew Passion to New York.
What happens when a hero comes home? The exploration of this question forms the basis of director Peter Sellars’ new production of Hercules at the Canadian Opera Company.
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.
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.
Under conductor Alan Gilbert, the New York Philharmonic and the New York Choral Artists gave an inspired but slightly uneven performance of J.S. Bach’s Mass in B minor on Wednesday night. Playing with great panache as well as a mindful sense of the historical weight of the piece, the vocalists and musicians gave bristling and glistening life to a timeless work.
It’s Richard Wagner’s bicentennial year, and everyone is getting in on the act. 22 different productions, by one count, of the complete Ring cycle will be seen worldwide, not to mention countless other celebratory evenings put on by sundry ensembles.
Bass-baritone Eric Owens is no stranger to Bay Area voice aficionados. After making his local debut as Lodovico in Otello with San Francisco Opera in 2002, Owens memorably created the diet-regiment-reciting General Leslie Groves there in the world première of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic in 2005.
In the last few decades, Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi has flirted with standard repertory status, but it has not sufficiently won the hearts of opera-goers to warrant more than the occasional production. Though blessed with some of the composer’s finest melodies, the opera has problems for modern audiences.
You won’t see plumed horses, a procession of camels, or a hundred supernumeraries as standard bearers parading across the Glimmerglass stage. In fact, you have to step outside the Alice Busch Opera Theater to see any elephants at all, the animal most commonly associated with Aida, Verdi’s greatest grand opera.
The seldom-seen opera musical Lost in the Stars found prominence Friday night, enrapturing a full house at Glimmerglass Festival in New York, moving some of the actors themselves to tears, and stirring the audience to its feet for curtain call.
“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.
Ancient Greek superheroes – irresistible. Half god, half man, incredible deeds leave Perseus, Theseus, and of course Hercules enough to rival Superman, Spiderman, and The Incredible Hulk. Small wonder then why these demigods and precursor of the modern comic book superhero have captivated the hearts and minds of many of the world’s greatest writers, dramatists and composers.
