This review is for the gala performance on August 25, 2018. The date of Leonard Bernstein’s 100thbirthday, and in all my years of making yearly pilgrimages to Tanglewood, I have never seens the grounds, the Koussevitzky Music Shed, the parking lots so full. If the great lawn can be standing room only, it was that night. challenging. The celebration was {…}
Early Music ensembles have a remarkable ability to think up the most exotic names for themselves. Il giardino armonico, Il pomo d’oro, Les Arts Florissants or Marinka Brecelj’s Fiori Musicali all have a horticultural perfume about them. Others reek of “après moi le deluge” regal panoply with the King’s Consort or La Grande Écurie et la Chambre du Roy taking {…}
The father of opera, as Claudio Monteverdi is often referred to, created the most magical music in the world about the darkest characters that had ever lived. How can we see beauty in horror and why life always juxtaposes the opposites? These questions run through your mind as you listen to “L’incoranazione di Poppea,” an ancient story of lust, seduction {…}
One of the highlights of the Innsbruck Early Music Festival is the “Cesti Competion,” for singers specialising in the baroque repertoire. Now in its ninth year, one of the prizes on offer for the contestants who qualify for the final round is the opportunity to sing in an opera at the following year’s festival. It is presented as “Barockoper: Jung,” {…}
Hans Werner Henze’s opera “The Bassarids” received its first performance at the Salzburg Festival on August 6, 1966. At the premiere, Christoph von Dohnanyi conducted the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. English-American poet W.H. Auden and his partner Chester Kallman wrote the libretto based on Euripides’ “Bacchae,” one of the last tragedies of the great Greek dramatist. Within weeks, the opera was {…}
Mention the name Antonio Salieri and one can’t help but to imagine the rivalry with Mozart portrayed in the film “Amadeus,” creating an image of a composer less-favored or even cast aside. While Salieri did enjoy a successful career during his lifetime, even directing the operas of the Habsburg court, his works have unfortunately not lasted well to the present {…}
One of the three operas being performed at this year’s Innsbruck Early Music Festival is Mercadante’s “Didone Abbandonata,” which may come as somewhat of a surprise to some, and begs the question: up to what point can a work be defined as “early music?” Many would certainly argue that Severio Mercadante’s music lies outside the definition. Yet, the director of {…}
Nicolà Vaccai (1790 – 1848) was an Italian composer determined to make a success in the field of opera. Unfortunately, and despite limited success, he was ultimately to fail, eclipsed in his early years by the genius of his contemporary, Gioacchino Rossini, and unable, in his later years, to adapt to the rapidly changing tastes exemplified in the new dramatic {…}
In order to review Bard Summerscape’s production of Anton Rubinstein’s seldom-heard opera, “Demon,” it may be best to actually review the work itself. This isn’t, after all, the super-familiar “La Bohème” we are talking about. While apparently the opera has found favor and a niche in the Russian Motherland, it is largely unknown throughout the rest of the known operatic {…}