Watching how baritone Thomas Hampson and bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni worked together in their recent “No Tenors Allowed!” recital at Jordan Hall as part of the Celebrity Series of Boston, one thing became quite obvious – a great recital might be a singing-actor’s best possible forum for expression. For some context, I saw Pisaroni in the Met’s recent production of “Don {…}
The return to New York of Aprile Millo, on an unbelievably frigid night, was both recital and celebration, where the packed-house audience soon forgot their shivers, radiating so much warmth towards the artist on stage. Millo’s highly anticipated recital – produced by the always-interesting New York City Opera — was her first concert in the city in nearly a decade. {…}
Sentimentality is possibly one of the most dishonest emotions we, as human beings, experience. It is also a destructive force in that it inserts a filter between reality and our perceptions, we cease to see the world as it is, but rather allow ourselves to construct a self-indulgent version, in which our feelings are deliberately accentuated or even completely manufactured, {…}
Most musicologists concur that Handel did a major cut and paste job on “Rinaldo,” as more than two thirds of the score was cribbed from earlier compositions. There are also three versions of this tremendously successful opera from 1711, 1717 and 1731. Depending on singers’ availability and vocal condition, innumerable nips and tucks occurred at almost all 53 performances during Handel’s {…}
Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2019 in Michael Grandage’s anonymous production. It’s a staging that unfortunately offers little to Mozart’s opera (unless you just want to see some fire at one point) and likely one that no one would miss if this opera were simply set on a black stage or given in {…}
The Metropolitan Opera completed its run of “Adriana Lecouvreur” on Saturday, Jan. 26, 2019. This opera had already been experienced and reviewed by OperaWire earlier in the run, but the high quality of this showcase was so great, that it felt worthwhile to check it out again, albeit with a major casting switch. Stronger Than Ever Those who had appeared {…}
On Friday night the house was full and the atmosphere was one of great anticipation for the sixth edition of the Paris Opera Competition at the Theatre des Champs-Elysées in Paris. The event has taken place here every year since its founding in 2010 by the late Pierre Vernes, who died in 2017. Each competition has been held as a {…}
On Tuesday, January 22, the Tucson Desert Song Festival presented soprano Corinne Winters in recital at the University of Arizona in Tucson. On entering, audience members were presented with no only a program listing the songs, but they also received printed copies of each song in both English and its original language. The lights were also kept high enough so {…}
On January 25, 2019, Arizona Opera presented Giuseppe Verdi’s opera of love and death, “La Traviata” at the Phoenix Symphony Hall—a perfect vehicle for the debut of 2017 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions Winner Vanessa Vasquez. Currently a recent graduate of the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia, Vasquez gave each note a beginning, a middle and a well planned {…}