(Credit: W. Hoesl) Lise Davidsen as the headliner in Tchaikovsky’s “Pique Dame” at the Munich Opera Festival is an apt addition. It is a production full of theatrical effects created by Benedict Andrews with full-screen projections of Lisa in various enticing poses, including cars serving as platforms for singers and chorus-women, a bleacher-filled chorus partially masked, and G-string quasi-strippers. There {…}
(Image credit: © Lidia Crisafulli) Julia Burbach directs a new production of “Eugene Onegin” at Opera Holland Park, Tchaikovsky’s passionate realisation of Alexander Pushkin’s classic Romantic verse novel. Bookish Tatyana falls for the lofty, Darcy-ish Onegin, a dashing figure but also a rebarative one. He lets her down gently – thinking he has done the honorable thing, which he both {…}
“Page to Opera Stage” looks at stories – real-life or fiction, old and new – that have inspired operas, and the ways these narratives have been edited and dramatized to fit a new medium. This month, we return to Pushkin and Tchaikovsky with “The Queen of Spades”, where an opera has expanded the original novella, radically altering characters and atmosphere {…}