(Photo: Richard Hubert Smith) “’La traviata’ last night a failure. Was the fault mine or the singers? Time will tell.” So wrote Giuseppe Verdi in a letter the day after the premiere performance in Venice in 1853. Fast forward to 2024, in the week of his Birthday, to Glyndebourne’s Tom Cairns 2014 revival production; and Verdi would probably have written {…}
(Photo credits: Hughes & Knight) Sopranos Aoife Miskelly and Nazan Fikret along with director and script writer Laura Attridge spoke with OperaWire about their unique experience in Vache Baroque’s new production of Pergolesi’s “L’Olimpiade.” This production which coincides with the 2024 Paralympics held in Buckinghamshire, which neighbors the birthplace of the games. Attridge discusses her process of developing an English {…}
(Photo: © Richard Hubert Smith/Glyndebourne Festival Opera 2024) The picnic hampers are packed, dinner jackets dry-cleaned, cufflinks wrangled, and drizzle forecast: the British country house opera season is back. It opens with a new production of Georges Bizet’s box-office stalwart “Carmen” from Glyndebourne Festival Opera, directed by Diane Paulus and conducted by Glyndebourne Music Director Robin Ticciati. This latest version, {…}
(Image Source: Official website) The great critic Edward Said saw Mozart and Da Ponte’s “Così fan tutte” as a work of irreconcilable contradictions: astonishingly tender in its explorations of longing, fear, and regret, yet also strangely cold and unredeemed; a world of libertinage and manipulation that burns forward without any clear moral purpose. The frivolity of its scenario is powerfully {…}