Olena Tokar's assured coloratura made an immediate success of the waltz with her convincingly adolescent appearance, rhythmic verve and stylish phrasing.
Vittorio Grigòlo and Diana Damrau repeated and cemented their intense on-stage relationship at the Met in Bartlett Sher's new production of Roméo et Juliette.
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.
If the production is full of pleasures, they do not immediately or obviously connect to a sense of some larger plan, which might have been helped along with a more dynamic set.
School’s out for summer and with it the opportunity for the Royal Opera’s Jette Parker Young Artists to showcase their talents in the end of term main stage performance.
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.
Gounod's Roméo et Juliette isn't exactly a rarity, but it is no longer one of the stalwarts of the opera repertoire, a position which it certainly occupied during the Victorian era (there were 102 performances at the Théâtre-Lyrique in Paris in the first year of its life, followed by 291 performances at the Opéra-Comique in the next twenty).
