(Photo: Marina Andrenucci) With Wexford Festival Opera about to start its 70th season, OperaWire thought it would be a good opportunity to interview one of this year’s star singers. Fortunately, we were able to catch up with the Italian soprano Valentina Mastrangelo the day before she flew to Ireland to start rehearsals. She will be appearing in the role Olivia {…}
The Festival Verdi has announced that it will dedicate its 2021 edition to Graham Vick. The festival said, “The 21st Festival Verdi will have the honor and responsibility of completing Vick’s last project, ‘Un Ballo in Maschera,’ which Jacopo Spirei will bring to the stage on Sept. 24. Therefore we will dedicate this edition to Vick.” Vick most recently directed {…}
English director Graham Vick has died at the age of 67. The director died of complications arising from COVID-19. Born on Dec. 30, 1953, in Birkenhead, England, Vick studied at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and went on to make his directing debut at the age of 24. He directed a production of Gustav Holst’s “Savitri” for the {…}
Credits: Groves Artists official website / John Batten / Julian Hargreaves The government of the United Kingdom has officially announced the list of New Year Honours 2021. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has awarded the honors to a number of persons for outstanding achievements across the country. Among those awarded is opera director Graham Vick, who was knighted for his {…}
(Credit: Jonas Holthaus) “Nothing was produced for the bin.” When the COVID-19 pandemic hurricane hit the world in full force in March 2020, opera houses all over the world were struck badly. All of them were forced to cancel the rest of their 2019-20 seasons, and many new productions were taken off the stage. However, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the {…}
OperaVision will present a live stream of “Paria” from the Poznan Opera House on June 30, 2019. The stream kicks off at 6 p.m. local time. That’s around 1 p.m. EDT and 10 a.m. PST for the start time. It will be available for repeat viewings on Opera Vision until Dec. 29, 2019. The work by Moniuszko will feature a {…}
Act two of “Le Nozze di Figaro” opens in a modern living room with sleekly designed furniture, surrounding a polar bear skin rug. On the back wall is a very large picture of an elephant crashing into the room. By Act three the same elephant is now standing inside the room. It has grown substantially. It is now a giant {…}
The mass movement of people that is taking place, from poor countries to the wealthier countries of the West, is causing social upheaval and human suffering on scale which has not been seen since the end of the Second World War. Millions of lives have been affected by this mass migratory flow, some positively, some negatively. Earlier this year, in {…}
Graham Vick having already produced “Manon Lescaut” in a traditional manner, a production with which he admitted to being less than pleased with, decided to take a fundamentally different approach for this production at the Teatro Filharmonico, Verona. Instead of presenting it as a simple narrative, Vick represented the work as a “morality lesson,” in a modern day setting, but {…}