(Photo: Franco Lannino) For its summer season Palermo’s Teatro Massimo moves outdoors to the Teatro di Verdura, situated in parkland on the outskirts of the city centre. The cool evening heat, with a gentle breeze blowing in from the sea, along with the theatre’s sizable stage and substantial amount of raked seating with excellent sight lines suggested everything was just {…}
Photos: Steven Pisano This review is of the July 27, 2021 performance. Opera is back in New York City, and it returned not as a big-budget production with gargantuan sets, light shows, animals, and all the trappings of grand opera but as a humble outdoor, semi-staged presentation of Rossini’s beloved comedy, “The Barber of Seville,” put on by Teatro Nuovo, {…}
(Credit: Jean-Louis Fernandez) The Festival d’Aix-en-Provence’s production of “Le Nozze di Figaro” was a visual stunner. Keeping up a brisk pace, it positively fizzed and sparkled as it zipped along, and had the audience roaring with laughter at what was a riotously funny presentation, full of color and bawdy humor. Such was the director Lotte de Beer’s skill in handling {…}
On July 22, 2021, Manhattan’s historic social club, The Players, played host to a concert of opera and musical theatre selections, performed by mezzo-soprano Madison Marie McIntosh and pianist Keith Chambers. The recital featured the premiere of songs from two new musicals by composer Jeff Shankley, “Brooklyn to Broadway,” and “Casanova.” A veteran of the stage and screen, Shankley has {…}
Chausson’s “Le Roi Arthus” is a masterpiece. The work, which the Frenchman, composed between 1886 and 1895, had its premiere in 1903, and has rarely been heard from again. Critics of the work have noted its heavy debt to the likes of Richard Wagner and César Franck, and on some level, one might be inclined to conclude that these open {…}
(Credit: Javier del Real) The Teatro Real de Madrid closed its season with 16 performances of “Tosca” and an incredible cast of three sopranos: Sondra Radvanovsky, Maria Agresta and Anna Netrebko; and four tenors: Joshep Calleja, Michael Fabiano, Jonas Kaufmann and Yusif Eyvazov. Kaufmann joined the cast alongside Radvanovsky and Carlos Álvarez for two performances. The expectations for the German {…}
(Photo: Marc Brenner) The world of spies, subterfuge, and assassination has long been grist to the operatic mill. Scarpia runs the secret police in “Tosca”; Paolo poisons Boccanegra in Verdi’s Venetian drama of political intrigue; Leonora infiltrates a prison disguised as a man in “Fidelio”. So a contemporary tale like that of dissident and former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned {…}
(Credit: Javier del Real) This review was written after the performance on the 3d of July, the first performance of cast B. I usually leave my opinion about the conductor for the end of the review, but in this case, since it affects the performances of the singers drastically, I have opted to give that opinion first. Nicola Luisotti’s reading {…}
(Photo: Jean-Louis Fernandez) Postponed from last year, owing to COVID restrictions, Kaija Saariaho’s new opera “Innocence” finally received its world premiere at this year’s Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, and it did not disappoint. The libretto, written by Sofi Oksanen, interweaves two narratives which relate to a school shooting. One focuses on the students and their teacher who were present at the time {…}
