Historically, Wagner stagings have stirred up controversy. They are–to put it bluntly–like a fashion show: seasonally recurrent, fanciful (for better or for worse), and tailored, if you will, to fit just about anything, the blatant as much as the abstruse. New productions, then, warrant a healthy degree of skepticism–especially when, as so often happens, the integrity of the work is {…}
As usual, the 2024 Innsbruck Early Music Festival brought a rare work to the stage: Francesco Bartolomeo Conti’s “Il trionfo della Fama,” a one-act serenata composed in 1723 for the coronation of Emperor Charles VI and Empress Elisabeth Christine in Prague. Conceived as court propaganda, the serenata was commissioned to glorify imperial virtues and Habsburgs’ claims to the divine favor {…}
Carl Heinrich Graun’s “Adriano in Siria”—set to a libretto by Pietro Metastasio—is a compelling example of mid-18th-century opera seria, a genre that once dominated the European stage. First performed in Berlin in 1746, Graun’s setting was one of more than seventy opera settings of Metastasio’s libretto between 1732 and 1828, attesting to its immense popularity. This new live recording from {…}
This is a portrait of the German composer Johann Joseph Abert, a kind of bait or, rather, bird call for curious music lovers, which explains why this disc contains only excerpts. A German composer born in 1832, Johann Joseph Abert’s fame began in 1860. As a composer of chamber music, organ music, lieder, and operas, as this musical portrait shows, {…}
Opera transcriptions for piano are legion. Some can claim no less originality than the compositions they derive from; others are divertimenti—products of 19th-century salon culture meant to delight. But few—if any—are entirely free of prejudice. Wagner fares best, with transcriptions available not only by Liszt, but also Stradal, Kocsis, and even Lugansky. For the Italians, there’s Liszt again; yet pianistic {…}
Reputedly, music is the medicine for sorrow and the companion to joy—“laetitia comes,” as the Latin has it. What’s more, it has the miraculous ability not only to make time stand still but to conjure, simultaneously, rapid flights of emotion. Music, in short, lays bare our humanity, distilled to its finest. Such is the theme—more or less—of Will Liverman’s “Dunbar/Moore {…}
“An American Soldier” by Huang Ruo is a striking timely piece. It is a tale about identity and what it means to be American—or to be perceived as such. At its core, it proffers a grimly pessimistic view of society, in which Pvt. Danny Chen, a New Yorker, was racially harassed, abused, and assaulted by fellow soldiers stationed in Afghanistan {…}
Drawn from two live performances in 2024, the Decca release of “The Flying Dutchman” arrives with no small sense of occasion. Its cast alone—Lise Davidsen, Gerald Finley, Stanislas de Barbeyrac—promises one of the most congenial pairings in recent memory. “The Flying Dutchman” has always occupied a somewhat ambivalent place in the Wagnerian discography: too early to be “Tristan,” too compact {…}
“Bluebeard,” or Barbe bleue, may very well rank among the most disturbing of Perrault’s fairy tales. Its notoriety is such that bluebeard, in everyday language, is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a man who marries and kills one wife after another.” The storyline is precisely that—though it has a happy ending, if slaying the murderous protagonist is the type of justice {…}