Sir Anthony Hopkins is a world-famous actor who also happens to be a gifted composer. Despite his considerable musical skills, he has made it quite clear that he is unqualified to direct an opera. In Poland, Andrzej Chyra enjoys A-list celebrity status as a one of the country’s foremost film and television actors. He is also probably partial to the {…}
This review is for the performance on June 8, 2018. This year’s Opera Fest has seen a number of fresh and highly inventive works. David Hertzberg’s “The Rose Elf” offers an immersive, and almost unbearably-intimate recount of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale. Staged within the catacombs of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, the audience seated themselves on opposite sides of the long {…}
The Australian composer Liza Lim received royal treatment at the 2018 edition of South Carolina’s Spoleto USA Festival in May, with the premiere of a new opera and two chamber works scheduled for the program and the esteemed JACK Quartet, adding another work to the proceedings upon hearing that she would be in residency. In addition to the quartet, the instrumental works {…}
Its preludes are themselves landmarks of beauty – but Wagner’s 1850 opera “Lohengrin” is a prelude to his future epics. Rooted in Arthurian legend, taking the son of King Parsifal as its hero, and featuring prayers to the pagan gods Wotan and Freia, it is another battle between the divine and the mortal. In mythical medieval Brabant, Count Friedrich von {…}
With over 150 opera productions to his credit, British director Keith Warner is hardly a neophyte in the lyric theatre. The mystery is how this respected regisseur could have made such a muddle out of “Nabucco” for the Deutsche Oper Berlin. After all, it is not so difficult to stage Verdi’s first great operatic triumph. Jean-Paul Scarpitta managed to come {…}
There is only one point in which the character of Private Danny Chen leaves the stage in composer Huang Ruo and librettist David Henry Hwang’s “An American Soldier,” seen in its world premiere this past weekend at Opera Theatre of St. Louis. It is near the end when the soldier dies and his final words when alive are as such: {…}
It is easy to see why Marc Blitzstein’s “Regina” is rarely performed. It’s a demanding work that tackles issues of greed, race relations and other seedy elements of humanity head-on while fusing many musical styles that make it hard to characterize. Because there are so many elements to this opera that includes 10 major characters, it is difficult to mount {…}
This review is for the performance on June 3, 2018. It’s quite often that operas, great and otherwise, have been adapted from, what we’d call today, other media. Whether plays or novels, it was standard practice for composers such as Verdi, Puccini and even Wagner to repurpose story and characters for the operatic stage. And there are so many impressive {…}
Vicenza’s Teatro Olimpico, designed by Palladio in 1580, is Europe’s oldest indoor theater. It is based on Vitruvius’s description of the theatres of Ancient Rome, and therefore, Classical in style. It has an elliptical, steeply-raked seating space as found in Ancient Greek and Roman open-air theatres, which provides for unrestricted views of the stage. Its auditorium is decorated by plaster {…}