| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 11-May-2013 The London Coliseum | Bring your mental body armour: Wozzeck at ENO |
 Military service brutalises. If you’re in any doubt about this, Berg’s short opera Wozzeck should dispel them, and particularly so in Carrie Cracknell’s new production for ENO. The fragmentary play on which Wozzeck is based, by Georg Büchner, originated in a true story of a soldier in the Napoleonic wars and was edited and published after the Franco-Prussian war; Berg wrote the opera in the aftermath of World War I; Cracknell moves it to the British military of today. It could be in any place at any time.
Read full review... | |
| 8-Feb-2013 Civic Opera House | Die Meistersinger fills the stage at Chicago's Lyric Opera |
 On Friday, a new co-production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg opened at the Lyric. The only comedy among Wagner’s mature music dramas, its sound is very much like that of the better-known tragedies – brassy, overfull, with a core of strings teetering at vibrato’s edge. But its style is heterogeneous where the tragedies are homogeneous, shifting rapidly through a Wagner-index of tropes and melodic figures.Read full review... | |
| 13-May-2011 Kennedy Center: Opera House | The Recipe of True Happiness |
 If you believe that true happiness can be found in music, I have a recipe for you to follow. Take a funny story of disguise, sham and mock marriage and set it to great music. Add a quartet of bel canto stars (a lyric tenor, a coloratura soprano, a baritone and a bass) and dress them in spectacular 17th century costumes. Add pantomime artists, masked dancers and a chorus. Place all in a commedia dell’arte ‘theater within theater’ set, painted in coral and gold.Read full review... | |
| 11-Dec-2010 Civic Opera House | Off with Their Heads! |
 “Off with their heads!” I vividly recall being terrorized as a preschooler hearing Walt Disney’s sadistic, loud-mouthed Queen of Hearts thunder these signature lines. I have since learned that decapitation as capital punishment is not exclusive to the fictional Queen of Hearts of Lewis Carroll and Walt Disney, but rather grim historical reality. Still, countless works of fiction – Carroll and his Disney offshoot included – have transformed it from this grisly punitive measure into a comic cliché.Read full review... | |
