Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Die tote Stadt (The Dead City)

With an unsurpassed cast, devoted conducting and a brilliantly imaginative staging, the Bavarian State Opera's new production of Korngold's Die tote Stadt is a triumph.

American singers Clay Hilley and Sara Jakubiak offered performances of distinction in two fiendishly difficult roles.

In Robert Carsen's staging, the “dead city” is absent: the scenery showing a bourgeois room that one imagines overlooking a bright avenue in Vienna or Berlin rather than a dark alley in Bruges.

The wealth of visual images displayed by director Graham Vick goes with the extraordinary richness of Korngold's music.

A terrific cast, led by soprano Celine Byrne and conducted by Patrik Ringborg deliver a compelling and thrilling performance of Korngold's Die tote Stadt.

Hamburg's revival of a 2015 production is a musical success, but the director's concepts are sometimes too dense to tell a straightforward story.

The Komische Oper's new staging of Korngold's opera doesn't quite offer the necessary scale or atmosphere. 

In a score that can be a Technicolor wallow, Jurowski’s sure sense of dramatic pulse and balance, encompassed the brash dance rhythms, religious grandeur, vivid tone painting and the extremes of dissonance.

Die tote Stadt at the Vienna State Opera features strong playing and singing but little drama.

Die tote Stadt’s bid for the mainstream proceeds with a musically strong revival of a perceptive if flawed staging at Oper Frankfurt

Starring celebrated heldentenor Klaus Florian Vogt, Kasper Holten's highly-praised production of Korngold's Die tote Stadt for Finnish National Opera is brilliantly revived.

Korngold’s Die tote Stadt is an extraordinary opera, an often underrated masterpiece of the 20th century. On the face of it, it has a simple plot – the protagonist Paul, unable to overcome the death of his wife, falls in love with another woman, Marietta, similar to his dead wife in many ways.

Au Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse, la ténébreuse Ville morte de Korngold est allégée par la mise en scène de Philipp Himmelmann. Direction musicale souple et plateau vocal équilibré complètent la production.

« More corn than gold », ironisait Irving Kolodin, à propos du compositeur viennois alors très en vue à Hollywood, mais tenu pour moins sérieux par la Neue Musik. La postérité n’aura donné que partiellement tort à ce critique à la dent dure, en n’exhumant que rarement l’œuvre de Korngold après la seconde guerre mondiale. 

Le samedi 30 janvier 2016, La Ville Morte de Korngold était programmée à l'Auditorium de la Maison de la Radio. Marzena Diakun dirigeait un Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France en pleine forme et une distribution vocale dominée par Camilla Nylund. Un délice.

In einer psychoanalytischen Inszenierung von Johannes Erath schwelgte das Grazer Philharmonische Orchester unter Dirk Kaftan in den üppigen Klangwogen von Korngolds Partitur; Die Sänger bestachen mit durchwegs hohem vokalen Niveau.