(Credit: Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera) Sunlight on the water, fog hovering. Homecoming at the Opera House, San Francisco September 2021. “Finalmente! Finally.” Masked and vaccinated we arrive at the doors of the War Memorial Opera House and are welcomed as if we are the stars. In a way we were: the ones who up until tonight, could not enter. The {…}
(Photo: Alciro Theodore da Silva) The relationship of art to society is a complex and ever-changing one. At times it is used to support the dominant values of the elite as was the case with the 17th and 18th century baroque, whilst during other periods, it sets itself up in opposition to society, underpinned by varying degrees of revolutionary intent. {…}
(Credit: SF/Maarten Vanden Abeele) Venetian composer Luigi Nono is no stranger at the Salzburg Festival. His operas and instrumental works have been regularly played here over the past decade. However, his most outspoken and outraged work, directed against the persistent violence perpetrated against innocent people was presented at the festival for the very first time. “Intolleranza 1960” premiered at Teatro {…}
(Photo: Francesco Dalla Pozza) Vicenza in Lirica opened last season’s program with a successful performance of Vivaldi’s oratorio “Juditha Triumphans,” a story from the book of Judith contained in the Apocrypha. The city of Bethulia is surrounded by its Assyrian enemies, and its leaders are too frightened to react. Judith, therefore, takes matters into her own hands. She sneaks into {…}
(Photo: Birgit Gufler) Following on from the previous evening’s heavy and unremittingly dark production of Mattheson’s “Boris Goudenow,” the Innsbruck Early Music Festival continued with a fresh, vibrant, and colorful performance of Telemann’s one-act serenata “Pastorelle en Musique,” written between 1713 – 1716, based on Mollière’s “Les Amants magnifiques.” As with “Boris Goudenow” the work was lost and has only {…}
(Photo: Birgit Gufler) In 1874 Mussorgsky’s ‘Boris Godunov’ received its premiere at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre. Yet, he was not the first to write an opera of that name, 164 years earlier in 1710 Johann Mattheson completed his version of “Boris Goudenow,” but for reasons which are now unclear it was not performed during the composer’s lifetime, and ended up {…}
The Bregenzer Festspiele, the annual open-air summer opera festival which takes place in Bregenz, Austria, revived its spectacular production of “Rigoletto” this July, a performance which originally premiered in the summer of 2019. After being closed for one season due to the pandemic, the festival has reopened, now requiring attendants to provide proof of negative COVID tests or vaccine certificates {…}
(Photo: Birgit Gufler) Bernardo Pasquini (1637 – 1710) is not a particularly well-known name in opera circles, yet in his day he was considered the foremost composer of dramatic works for the stage in Rome, with his high point coming in the 1670s and 80s, after which he was slowly displaced by, amongst others, Alessandro Scarlatti. As well as 15 {…}
What a wonder Giuseppe Verdi’s final opera “Falstaff” is. After all, he had, outside of his “Quattro pezzi sacri,” retired from the “arena” of composing and opera (with one of the grandest of all grand operas, “Aida”). But then, fate conspired, in a rather unlikely way, to have the maestro cross paths, and then lives, and ultimately work itself, with {…}