| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 18-May-2013 Salle Wilfrid Pelletier | L'Opéra de Montréal's Manon with Marianne Fiset |
 © Yves Renaud.jpg) Manon was not only central to Jules Massenet’s claim to international celebrity after its creation in 1884, it remains at the heart of the operatic repertoire and Massenet’s popularity today. Manon returned to the stage of L’Opéra de Montréal on 18 May after a lengthy absence to close the company’s 2012/13 season. Bernard Uzan’s naturalistic production, setting the work in its traditional early 18th-century guise, is a generation old and shows its age, remaining functional at best.Read full review... | |
| 30-Apr-2013 Staatsoper | Werther at the Wiener Staatsoper |
 Goethe’s epistolary novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (“The Sorrows of Young Werther”) hit the 1774 zeitgeist not only because it brought back emotion to the rather sober Age of Enlightenment, but because the tragic title hero sports a multi-faceted character that lends itself to various interpretations and projections, therefore making it easy to feel sympathy or even partly identify with the young man who kills himself because his beloved Lotte is married to another.Read full review... | |
| 6-Apr-2013 National Concert Hall | Drama at Joseph Calleja's concert in Dublin |
 There was more than a little drama at Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja’s sold-out concert recital in Dublin’s National Concert Hall this evening. He was joined by Irish soprano Claudia Boyle and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Proinnsías Ó Duinn. Predictability was the order of the day in the choice of programme: familiar arias and duets from the Italian and French operas with a complementary sprinkling of overtures and intermezzi for the orchestra. This was as close one gets to popular classical music: songs that might feature on the classical charts.Read full review... | |
| 2-Mar-2013 The Academy of Vocal Arts: Warden Theater | Don Quichotte victorious at Philadelphia Academy |
 As the legend goes, a noble cavalier loses his battle with giant windmills. But the Academy of Vocal Arts wins big with their latest production, Jules Massenet’s melodic Don Quichotte.
It was a first-rate evening of opera at the Helen Corning Warden Theater in Philadelphia, the home of the City of Brotherly Love’s world-renowned opera training academy that, year in and year out, prepares its alumni to succeed at the world’s greatest opera houses.
Read full review... | |
