A Register of First Performances of English Operas and Semi-operas from the 16th Century to 1980
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 17 hours ago
With opera house attendances falling alarmingly, venues such as La Scala in Milan are trying to titillate and lure the young The image appears to come straight from a horror movie. A woman cries out in pain and anguish, her cheek streaked with blood. Behind her, figures perform an elaborate dance of death. In letters of crimson red, the tagline screams: "Two fell in love, the others massacred...
Underbelly (Free subscription) | 11 hours ago
I don't think I ever really got Turandot until today. I had seen it only once before, and that under inauspicious conditions. It was a David Hockney production at San Francisco, with some sort of bleachers/platform built up at the back of the stage. I was way back in the balcony and most of the performance took place way up in those bleachers, so I went through most of the evening seeing the cast only...
The Independent (Free subscription) | 17 hours ago
Joyce Di Donato's Colbran, the Muse follows much the same recital-as-biography format as Cecilia Bartoli's Maria Malibran disc,though the arias are exclusively by Rossini and the orchestra is exclusively modern instruments.There are some gems here– a touching reading of Desdemona's prayer, "Dehcalma, o ciel, nel sonno" from Otello, and a cameo appearance from tenor Lawrence Brownlee...
The Composed Gentleman (Free subscription) | yesterday
The broadcast of Puccini's opera Turandot will be presented live for only one day on Saturday, November 7, 2009 at 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT in select movie theatres. Director Franco Zeffirelli's breathtaking production of Puccini's last opera is a favorite of the Met repertoire.The Metropolitan Opera: TurandotLength: 3 hours, 25 minutesTurandot Synopsis from the Metropolitan Opera: ACT I. Peking,
Vancouver Opera Blog (Free subscription) | yesterday
Photo credit by Clive Barda & San Francisco Opera We love it when our friends visit other cities. And that's because they love telling us all about the amazing operas they saw! D.S. Spring and Diana Herbst spent last week in San Francisco and was at the opera. Three nights in a row! That's devotion. D.S. and Diana thoroughly enjoyed the San Francisco Opera and were literally blown away by both...
The Independent (Free subscription) | yesterday
Nature and nurture - and all the dark and unexpected places in between. Some - Duke Bluebeard's cellar - you may never want to return to; others might invoke smiles, even laughter. English National Opera's audacious double-bill turns expectation on its head and springs so many surprises that to write about it at all - and it isn't an easy event to capture in words - runs the risk of giving the entire...
Progressive Alaska (Free subscription) | yesterday
Here's Maria Callas singing the pathetically touching pre-suicide song of a princess forced to become a nun after she had conceived a love child out of wedlock, in Puccini's short story, Sister Angelica . The Anchorage Opera is presenting this brief masterpiece, along with Leoncavello's Pagliacci , in a duo billing that is elegant in its juxtaposition of these two short operas, together. Usually, Pagliacci...
mostly opera... (Free subscription) | 06/11/2009
Renée Fleming and Christoph Eschenbach in CopenhagenRenée Fleming with Orchestre de Paris conducted by Christoph Eschenbach. Copenhagen, May 11th, 2009. Program: Capriccio final scene and Bruckner´s 9th symphony. Extras: Zueinigung and Morgen (R. Strauss).Upon reading that at her recent London concert, Renée Fleming was criticized for singing approximately 20 minutes, I was...
SFist (Free subscription) | 06/11/2009
As we noted last week in the New School Cocktail Glossary , the bar program over at Camino in Oakland, just like the food, is focused entirely on local, seasonal, sustainable, organic ingredients and spirits -- so that means if there's a point in time when there are no local limes available, all the drinks will be made without limes, and all the drinks are made with local liquors. Camino was opened...
I'll think of something later (Free subscription) | 06/11/2009
Lord Britten would surely have forgiven Sir Charles all his past innuendoes and applauded his magnificent return to the fold if he could have seen the nearly-84-year old tearing into his most concentrated masterpiece, The Turn of the Screw , in the Coliseum revival of David McVicar's English National/Mariinsky Opera production. It prompted me to look back at what Mackerras had to say about his chequered...
Classical Iconoclast (Free subscription) | 06/11/2009
Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex is so dramatic it hardly needs staging. Stravinsky wanted the text in Latin, deliberately distancing the text from listeners, to further strengthen the idea of ancient, impenetrable mystery. So a story of ancient Greece, written first in French by Jean Cocteau and back-translated into Latin. Setting this performance in Japanese pre-history extends the idea that this saga is...
Liverpool Daily Post.co.uk (Free subscription) | 06/11/2009
Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte, conducted by Andrew Parrott, can be seen on Tuesday and Friday and will be sung in English. A new production of Massenet’s Werther is on Wednesday and Saturday and is distinguished by the appearance of Alice Coote as Charlotte opposite Paul Nilon’s Werther. This is sung in French with English sur-titles and Richard Farnes conducts.
Joe. My. God. (Free subscription) | 05/11/2009
My loyal companion Aaron writes from his exile in Oregon to suggest that opera fans here on JMG would enjoy Journeying Boy: The Diaries of the Young Benjamin Britten, which comes out today. A review in the Guardian UK headlined Boys, Bitching, Brilliance notes: Benjamin Britten's early years are often ignored, overshadowed by the spectacular success of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, when he was 31....
ThePoliceTour.com . What's New (Free subscription) | 05/11/2009
You'd think Stewart Copeland might have taken a break after the Police reunion tour - 158 gigs, 921,000 paying customers, $297 million gross. But since their final Madison Square Garden show on August 7 last year, in addition to his TV and movie soundtrack "day job", he's written two more "classical" pieces and the two items for which he spent part of September in London - his...
Mercury News (Free subscription) | 05/11/2009
Mezzo-soprano Betany Coffland talks about playing the lead in Rossini's take on 'Cinderella.'
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