Opera Australia’s annual Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour returned this year after last year’s Covid-enforced hiatus with a re-staging by Constantine Costi of the production of “La Traviata” by Francesca Zambello which, back in 2012, launched this Sydney institution. How a venue brings out different qualities in a familiar work is one of the fascinating aspects of theatrical performance traditions. {…}
(Photo: Joel Filipe) Every Friday, Polina Lyapustina delivers a short essay on some of the most essential topics in the industry with the intent of establishing a dialogue about the opera world and its future. This week, the opera world discussed breaking news — a COVID-19 Outbreak during rehearsals for a “Peter Grimes” production at Teatro Real de Madrid has vaulted the {…}
The beauty of “Götterdämmerung” is not only that it is the artful conclusion to the massive cycle of thoughts, ideas, story, and feelings that are its previous operas, but that it is its own lift to all that precedes it. Love and lust, jealousy and power, greed and hate, infinity and finitude, community and individualism – all take their place {…}
(Photo by Jesse Hammer) Every Friday, Polina Lyapustina delivers a short essay on some of the most essential topics in the industry with the intent of establishing a dialogue about the opera world and its future. On March 25, Opera Australia renewed its activity starting with a run of “La Traviata” at Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour. Director Constantine Costi reapproached {…}
(Credit: Javier del Real) In a recent review, I took stock of the Teatro Real de Madrid’s production of “Norma” and its first cast. But I also had the opportunity to check out the other cast of the work, including Hibla Gerzmava in her debut as the title character. Unfortunately, it was not the auspicious debut one would have imagined {…}
(Photo: Baltic Opera) Olga Benário Prestes is a name largely unknown in the West, yet in Brazil and former East Germany she was a revolutionary heroine, to the extent that she has become the subject of numerous plays, books, and films. Between 1987 and 1997 the Brazilian composer Jorges Antunes added to the catalog an opera based on her life, {…}
Grange Park Opera has followed their inventive “Owen Wingrave“, a work intended for television, with a filmed realization of Maurice Ravel’s one-act farce “L’heure espagnole,” the story of a clockmaker’s wife who has to shuffle her liaisons like a deck of cards. Director Stephen Medcalf updated the action from eighteenth-century Toledo – given glancing mention through a Goya print on {…}
(Photo by Natasha Spencer) Every Friday, Polina Lyapustina delivers a short essay on some of the most sensitive topics in the industry with the intent of establishing a dialogue about the opera world and its future. On March 24, Opera Managers Association International issued an open letter, demanding “solutions” to the Global Culture Drain. During a month marking one year of global {…}
Gounod’s “Faust” is the quintessential French grand opera. It premiered in Paris at the Théâtre Lyrique in 1859, with spoken dialogues and less musical numbers. The opera was an immense success, and up until 1869 it was represented 314 performances. Subsequent changes included recitatives instead of spoken dialogue, an aria for Valentin, and the ballet during the “Walpurgis Night” scene {…}