Photo credit: Marco Caselli Nirmal Vivaldi’s “Orlando Furioso” is a work that represents baroque opera at its most exciting. Set on Alcina’s magical island, where the weird and wonderful are commonplace, it opens up the possibility for colorful and spectacular stagings with shipwrecks, fantastical beasts, monsters and statues that come to life. There are high mountains, wooded groves, steep cliffs {…}
(Credits: Jürgen Frank / Yiorgos Mavropoulos / @ Sony / Gregor Hohenberg / Lukasz Rajchert / Carsten Sander) The Konzerthaus Dortmund has announced its 2021-22 season. For the purpose of this article, we will focus on the vocal works only. Soprano Sophie Karthäuser kicks off the season with a performance of Beethoven‘s “Pastorale.” Laurence Equilbey conducts the production by Carlus {…}
As part of its 2017 programme, the Festival della Valle D’Itria presented a staging of Vivaldi’s opera “Orlando Furioso.” Embracing the performance traditions of the baroque period and resisting the temptation to make the work “relevant,” its director, Fabio Ceresa and his production team produced a splendid reading of the work, full of color, spectacle, and beauty. The musical direction, {…}
During his lifetime Vivaldi was a prolific composer of operas, responsible for setting at least 45 libretti, linked to at least 67 stage works, although Vivaldi claimed it to be 94. Yet, today his operatic output has been largely forgotten, being at best, of marginal interest to the opera-going public, restricted to recordings, rare concerts, and even rarer staged performances. {…}