During its 350th anniversary season, the Opéra National de Paris presented a new production of one of the most difficult and controversial Verdi’s operas, “Simon Boccanegra.” With a solid cast and no boundaries of interpretation, Calixto Bieito decided to tell a recklessly modernized story, with characters seemed prohibited from interacting with one another and simply had to ignore each other {…}
It’s been three years since Juan Diego Flórez stepped on a New York stage. The last time was in 2015 and it was for the premiere of “La Donna del Lago” at the Metropolitan Opera. While the opera itself was a new addition to the Met repertory, it wasn’t a surprising choice for the tenor as the New York audiences {…}
Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s “It’s A Wonderful Life” opened earlier this week at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House. An American success story based on “The Greatest Gift” by Philip Van Doren Stern, and Frank Capra’s beloved film on the same story, it combined old and new, young and original, odd and familiar, poignant and comic. Neither movie nor {…}
Teatro Real decided to open the 2018-19 season with Gounod’s “Faust,” an opera which have been staged only once in 2003 since the theatre reopened in 1997. The expectations were high, with a strong cast lead by the international star tenor Piotr Beczala and accompanied by Marina Rebeka and Luca Pisaroni; the young conductor Ed Ettinger was in charge of {…}
“The Gospel according to the other Mary,” is defined by John Adams, and the complier of the libretto, Peter Sellars, as an opera-oratorio, and sitting in the concert hall of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, in Rome, watching a performance of the work, conducted by the composer, it is easy to see why. For this is a work that {…}
Even by usual standards of patently implausible baroque opera plots, “Rodelinda” reaches new heights of Delphic abstruseness. William Hartston in the London Express described Handel’s 19th opera as “everyone wanting to marry or kill everyone else.” Regardless of Hartston’s hyperbole, confusion certainly abounds. A Penelope-esque wife erroneously thinks her husband is dead not once, but twice. The two principal protagonists {…}
We had the unexpected pleasure of attending the last Cycle of the Keith Warner production of “Der Ring des Nibelungen” at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (September 26 through November 2, 2018). Warner’s production, like most modern productions, had several insightful touches and many silly ones. The performance begins and ends with the Rhine Maidens in a “natural state” {…}
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 {…}
I once saw an evening of Kathakali theater, a kind of folk opera of southern India. I would probably not have understood much of what was going on in “The Killing of Dushasana” had I not read the program booklet beforehand. Even so, after the first scene my regular biases for dialectic drama vanished and I was hooked, overwhelmed by {…}