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...
Molly Fillmore was flown in from Arizona yesterday to replace an ailing Nadja Michael as the lead in San Francisco Opera's Salome . General Director David Gockley, in his own inimitable way, took great pains to pronounce Michael's name correctly, and then told the audience we were about to hear and see "Molly Dill," even though he had a note in his hand. Thanks David- the season has been...
The best art lingers like an aftertaste in your mouth, sometimes an unpleasant one. San Francisco Opera's current production of Richard Strauss' Salome is art on that level. It left me with a visceral feeling of having witnessed the perverse melt-down of a sexually abused and confused young girl. I can't say it was fun to watch, but it was thrilling in a weird, icky way. What this production does,...
There it is in the very first bar of Janacek's Jenufa ( Her Stepdaughter , as the 1955 vocal score I bought second-hand in Prague still calls it), the sound of the revolving mill wheel he went and checked out, and came up with a xylophone, not a typical sonority for 1903/4 (Strauss two years later was still calling it a 'wood and straw instrument' for Salome , though of course Saint-Saens had got there...
Yesterday I submitted a comment to San Francisco Classical Voice in response to Jason Victor Serinus' review of the current San Francisco Opera production of Richard Strauss' Salome . I wanted to pick up on his observation that Kim Begley had played Herod as "a pathetic wimp of a lush hardly capable of wearing the crown" (without saying very much about whether this was Begley's decision,...
Soprano Nadja Michael makes her San Francisco debut in Richard Strauss’ tale of Biblical bad girl By Seán Martinfield Sentinel Editor and Publisher Photo by Lynn Imanaka San Francisco Opera presents Richard Strauss’ biblical drama SALOME, starring German soprano Nadja Michael in the title role. Ms Michael makes her Company debut in this co-production with Opera Theatre of Saint [...]...
Sounds like they're making quite a meal out of Turandot at the English National Opera, though whether a grisly new banquet of horrors or just a bubble-and-squeak remains to be seen (by me, at least, not until mid-November). In the meantime, heading our tributes to several new productions in town this season, I've started the City Lit Opera in Focus course with Puccini's swansong, going on this term...
Before we headed out to Aida last night, I realized that I was going to be adding a new opera to my “list” of works I’ve seen. I’d never actually written them all down, though, so this morning I’ve been going through my memory (and opera company archive websites), and I think I’ve come up with most of them: 67! Not bad, I think. Do any of you do this? Maury ? JSU...
The German soprano Hildegard Behrens was a magnificent interpreter of the heroines of Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner. At the beginning of her career she sang several Mozart roles and such German classic staples as Agathe in Weber's Der Freischütz, but as her voice grew stronger and her acting talents increased she seemed irresistibly drawn to characters such as Strauss's Salome and Elektra,...
The German soprano, especially noted for her Wagner and Strauss, passed away yesterday at the age of 72. Above, she sings “Vissi d’arte” from “Tosca.” Opera News has a brief obituary here, with the promise of a more substantive notice to come. I was lucky enough to see her perform just once, in “Salome” at L.A. Opera [...]
Hildegard Behrens was a German lyric-dramatic soprano in the classical tradition whose career spanned the last quarter of the 20th century. At her peak she was one of the leading exponents of the Wagner-Strauss repertoire and was particularly noted for her Senta, Brünnhilde, Isolde, Salome and Elektra, as well as Leonore in Beethoven’s Fidelio and Marie in Berg’s Wozzeck.
UPDATE 8/18/09: I added yet another review below, this time a review of the new Pittsburgh Symphony disc on Pentatone with Janowski. I don't have the disc yet (it was released in Europe first), but when I do I will review it, too. The Sunday Times (London) Stephen Pettitt RICHARD STRAUSS *** (out of 5) Eine Alpensinfonie; Macbeth Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, cond Marek Janowski Pentatone Classics...
Strauss is a common-enough name in the German-speaking world. And it was particularly prevalent in the musical community at the turn of the last century. What with the Johann Strauss Junior and Senior axis, as well as Oscar Straus dominating the operetta scene, Richard Strauss would have found it hard to stake a singular claim on the moniker. But is this just a spurious play on words or is there
We for the first time saw via PBS the Met's HD film of this Met production, and, production-wise, virtually everything about it was imbecile. Salome...
Opera Theatre of Saint Louis' production of Richard Strauss' Salome is the most mind-blowing piece of theater I've seen in all my years of reviewing opera for RFT . But then, it has always been thus with Salome . The combination of Strauss' revolutionary music, the salac...
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