(Photo: La Boheme movie still press image) There’s no denying it. Italian opera, or ANY opera in another language for that matter, loses something, intrinsically, when it’s sung in English. Additionally, operas performed as a motion picture for cinema lose something more, by necessity, the artists having to mime to a pre-recorded rendition, negating the true passion and emotion of {…}
(Photo credit: Marty Sohl) This review was written in collaboration with David Salazar. On April 23, the Metropolitan Opera opened a new production of “Lucia di Lammermoor.” This marked the second production of Donizetti’s masterpiece during General Manager Peter Gelb’s term. In 2007, the company brought a production by Mary Zimmerman which set the piece in Victorian times and {…}
(Photo: Opera Company of Middlebury) Opera Company of Middlebury’s utterly delightful streaming production of Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide,” originally broadcast in June 2021, is back for a few more days, and viewable on OCM’s YouTube channel through Mar. 1, 2022. Don’t miss it. The pandemic was the mother of innovation. And OCM created the best of all possible worlds (wink, wink) {…}
(Photo credit: Lerner Productions, LLC) Whether or not it’s been spurred by COVID, more and more companies seem to be making post-streams or online streams of their productions available. This one, of Verdi’s “Il Trovatore,” comes from Houston’s Opera in the Heights, a regional company that seeks to provide a platform for emerging artists and affordable and accessible productions for {…}
LA Opera is no stranger to livestreaming. Since the COVID-19 pandemic first shuttered theaters, they have been at the digital forefront, continuing to provide exceptional performances, albeit in new and exciting ways that worked within stipulated health regulations. But even before the pandemic, in 2019, LA Opera’s imaginative production of “The Magic Flute,” directed by Barrie Kosky, used state-of-the-art projection {…}
Following its successful “20 Shots of Opera,” which streamed to widespread acclaim, Irish National Opera has created “A Thing I Cannot Name,” a newly filmed opera, which it recently premiered at the West Cork Literary Festival. With a running time of approximately 20 minutes, it builds upon the company’s experience of presenting short new works through the medium of film, {…}
The first Act of “Die Walküre” is undeniably a grand love song. Wagner’s dramatization of the encounter between Siegmund and Sieglinde—the Walsüng twins—is a remarkable and thrilling experience; even when it is an abridged concert version, performed in a faraway opera house with half a live audience, socially distanced, without the theatrical panoply of full-site production, full costumes and full {…}
The Dutch National Opera like many Opera Houses around the world has not been able to perform live since the COVID-19 pandemic began. As a result, it has been offering some streamed performances. On this occasion, the company presented an homage to Donizetti’s Tudor Queens and previewed the three operas which will be programmed during the next three seasons. In {…}
The beauty of “Götterdämmerung” is not only that it is the artful conclusion to the massive cycle of thoughts, ideas, story, and feelings that are its previous operas, but that it is its own lift to all that precedes it. Love and lust, jealousy and power, greed and hate, infinity and finitude, community and individualism – all take their place {…}
Grange Park Opera has followed their inventive “Owen Wingrave“, a work intended for television, with a filmed realization of Maurice Ravel’s one-act farce “L’heure espagnole,” the story of a clockmaker’s wife who has to shuffle her liaisons like a deck of cards. Director Stephen Medcalf updated the action from eighteenth-century Toledo – given glancing mention through a Goya print on {…}
In the 2018 San Francisco version of Francisca Zambello’s “Siegfried,” we get a touching side of the evolving picture Wagner depicts throughout The Ring cycle. Here is the hero-to-be, Siegfried, son of the coupling of Siegmund and Sieglinde, deep in his forest home, with his parental surrogate, Mime. The encounter we witness at the start is full of baiting and {…}