San Francisco Opera’s “Don Giovanni” brings us bass-baritones with gusto, sopranos with flair, a tenor who pleads his case with feeling, and an opera that never ceases to amaze. Opening SFO’s 2017 summer season, Jacopo Spirei, in his SFO debut, offers us the ever satisfying chestnut in as provocative and seductive a production as the Don himself. Who can {…}
Cleveland is tough on her Mimì’s. Just over a year ago, Cleveland Opera Theater brought the Puccini warhorse “La Bohème” to the Masonic Auditorium of Cleveland, with founder and Executive Director Andrea Anelli as the tragic heroine; a month later, she arrived at an impasse with her Board of Directors and was out. One wonders whether Dorota Sobieska, who for {…}
For the past week the Moscow Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra, under the direction fo Vladimir Spivakov, has been touring the country performing works from Shostakovich, Bellini, Grieg, Mozart and many more. It has been a tour accompanied by Hibla Gerzmava and Danielle Atka. After successful concerts in Chicago, it was time for New York audiences to see what the hype was {…}
Alan Gilbert is saying goodbye to the New York Philharmonic as music director. It ends a tenure that brought significant new works and experimented with the standard repertoire alongside one of the finest orchestras in the world. But Gilbert has made sure to make opera a mainstay for the New York Philharmonic so it is no surprise that he ends his {…}
How do you put on a gala? That is a question that most houses sometimes ask. Some think it is about uniting the most stars and having them walk on stage and just sing arias one after the other. Other houses put on different scenes from operas. Most recently we witnessed singers in costumes, standing and singing for over four {…}
Once again, San Francisco offers us an original, Opera Parallèle’s “Les Enfants Terribles” by celebrated American composer Philip Glass. In 1996, Glass adapted the story from the novel (1929) and film (1950) of the same name by the famous French artist and toast of the town Jean Cocteau, who himself took the myth of eternal youth as his starting point. Glass’s opera-ballet {…}
Mozart’s “Così fan tutte,” a drama giocoso in two acts, was performed in Geneva, Switzerland’s second-largest city, during the first half of May 2017 to popular and media acclaim. The staging, scenery, costumes, and accessories were produced entirely by the Grand Thèâtre de Genève, a pillar of the city’s bustling and diverse cultural life. Opera has thrived in Geneva since {…}
The starting point for any production of Peter Grimes lies in the interpretation of the opera’s central character, namely Peter Grimes himself: to what extent should the audience be encouraged to view the anti-hero as an outsider, a victim of the underlying, but all-pervading intolerance and hypocrisy which saturates the Borough, rather than simply as a sadistic sociopath? Clearly, any {…}
It was one of New York City’s truly beautiful, spring days on May 14, 2017, which made it all the harder to leave the sun and enter into the glass lobby of the Alice Tully Recital Hall, but Carolyn Sampson was here to give a recital of her floral-themed program of art song, from her CD “Fleurs,” released in 2015. {…}