The young artists of Teatro Grattacielo, along with special guest star the inimitable Karen Slack, showcased rare gems of verismo arias and art songs at the company’s 2021 Annual Fund Gala presented in collaboration with Camerata Bardi Vocal Academy. Teatro Grattacielo held the gala at the opulent Columbus Citizens Foundation in New York City on Friday evening, June 18. The {…}
(Photo: Roberto Ricci) With its commitment to producing contemporary works, The Haydn Foundation situated in Bolzano under the artistic direction of Matthias Lošek, must have one of the most ambitious opera programs in Italy, if not Europe. Over the past few years, it has consistently promoted and commissioned new pieces which it intersperses with thematically linked known works. It is {…}
(Credit: Vincent Pontet/Opera de Paris) This review is from the opening night on the 4th of June 2021 For months the Opéra de Paris was doing it all it could to reopen. But the pandemic would not allow it. The result was that many productions were forced on digital platforms, including its recent “Faust” showcase. But alas, after 15 months {…}
(Photo: Roberto Ricci) “Alice in Wonderland,” Lewis Carroll’s novel which has entertained children down the generations is a multi-layered work, which has lent itself to a variety of interpretations over the years, in which commentators from many disciplines have looked beyond the colorful narrative, to reveal its symbolic references, satirical portraits, psychological depths, and its mathematical and linguistic conceits. Such {…}
Grange Park Opera, the brainchild of go-getting impresario Wasfi Kani, has taken an energetic approach to the COVID-19 pandemic over the last year, seeing opportunity in challenge. They commissioned and performed a brand new work last summer on the hoof, “A Feast in a time of Plague;” they have offered filmed versions of Britten’s “Owen Wingrave” and Ravel’s “L’heure Espagnole.” {…}
(Photo: Marco Borelli) High up on the right hand side of the apse, the Empress Teodora and her retinue look down onto the altar of Ravenna’s Basilica of San Vitale. The image is a golden mosaic infused with greens and purples. Teodora’s regal gaze dominates the picture, her knowing stare is cast upon the streams of visitors who come each {…}
(Credit: Ali Wright) Opera Holland Park’s season opened this week with the quintessential summer opera – a new production by Oliver Platt of W.A. Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte’s “Le nozze di Figaro,” a farce that is still as sparklingly inventive and effervescent as it was over 200 years ago. There is much to praise in this opening artistic salvo {…}
Rossini’s operatic world is a crossroads of things: the formal conventions of arias, duets, cavatina, patter number, the stock characters of the Commedia dell’arte, a hotchpotch of contemporary patriarchal and orientalist stereotypes, and reheated scenarios from various librettists. How do modern audiences, relatively unmoored from this world, connect with these shows? A Brilliant Production In this new production of “Il {…}
It is an under-appreciated coincidence that Janacek’s searing opera of bourgeois repressiveness and psychological collapse appears in the same year as fellow Moravian Sigmund Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and his study of “Mass Psychology” (they were, in fact, born mere miles apart). “Kat’a Kabanova” is a psychic drama of shame and self-hatred. As in Freud’s work, Janacek creates a {…}