(Photo: Studio B12 di Gianpaolo Guarneri) The duet “Pur ti miro, pur ti godo,” which brought Teatro Aligheri’s presentation of “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” to its conclusion, was rightly met with enthusiastic applause from the audience. The sensitivity, emotional depth and detail that countertenor Federico Fiorio and soprano Roberta Mameli were able to bring to their singing was breathtaking. Their voices {…}
Photo: Winslow Townson The first time my partner watched Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” he couldn’t believe that the composer ever thought a Stalinist regime would be pleased with the opera. The “in-your-face” power of the work made him—a (handsome) man whose political convictions ponder between socialism and cowboyism—find endearing that ‘Shosta’ could not see his censoring coming. Even today, {…}
Photo credit: © António Pedro Ferreira / São Carlos This year marks the 50th anniversary of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, a momentous historical event which brought down the totalitarian regime installed by fascist dictator Antonio Salazar in 1974. This bloodless revolution led the small Iberian nation on a path towards a modern, humanist and democratic European republic. This season many of {…}
Photo: Marco Borrelli On Sunday January 28th, 2024, the Opéra de Monte-Carlo gave the penultimate performance of a new production of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare in Egitto,” the third in a series of Handel productions featuring Cecilia Bartoli, following “Ariodante” in 2019 and “Alcina” in 2023, both staged by Christof Loy. This time, the staging was entrusted to Davide Livermore, scenographer {…}
Photo credit: Keith Saunders Opera Australia’s 2024 season at the Sydney Opera House continued on January 12th with a beguiling production of Gluck’s 18th century “Orpheus and Eurydice.” Originally a co-production between Opera Queensland and acrobatic troupe Circa, which Opera Australia now offered as their contribution to this year’s Festival of Sydney, this is a summer event that annually offers {…}
Photo: Maria Baranova Prototype Festival’s Out of Bounds presented the world premiere of “Malinxe” on January 20th, 2024, in the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place. Out of Bounds is a platform for new vocal performance pieces that take place in unlikely locations across New York City. Through these new works, Out of Bounds makes public places into temporary spaces of {…}
Anthony Roth Costanzo is currently one of the most popular countertenors. There are more than a few good reasons why, including his powerful voice which resonates well in the Metropolitan Opera and the London Coliseum, his good impresario skills, his activism especially for LGBTQ+ causes which is meaningful to countless young musicians and operagoers. Not that the Operatic world {…}
Photo: Maria Baranova Prototype Festival presented “Adoration” at New York City’s The Sheen Center for Thought & Culture on January 12th, 2024. It was an innovative opera, featuring both voices, an amplified string quartet, and technical sound engineering, composed by Mary Kouyoumdjian with a libretto by Royce Vavrek. This world premiere, shockingly timely, challenged audience members to examine bias while {…}
(Photo credit: © ROH 2024/Tristram Kenton) Had a family bust-up over the holidays? Don’t worry – it could be worse. Richard Strauss’ “Elektra,” with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal from his 1903 play of the same, took a dysfunctional family of the opera stage to new extremes, boiling up Sophocles’ tale of matricide in the Freudian pressure cooker of {…}