| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 4-Aug-2012 Felsenreitschule | A visually brilliant but serious Zauberflöte at the Salzburg Festival |
The new Zauberflöte at this summer’s Salzburg Festival is a visually brilliant production with sets tailored to the atmospheric venue of the Felsenreitschule (for people not familiar with Salzburg, this is where the singing contest was held in the film The Sound of Music). The set, by Mathis Neidhardt, consists of four interlocking box-type rooms with façades of doors and arches (imitating the arched walls of the Felsenreitschule), which in various configurations function as the forest, the temple, Pamina’s room, and the place of the trial by fire and water.Read full review... | |
| 24-May-2012 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Nina Stemme comes out ahead in Cleveland Orchestra's Salome |
“When I looked at you, I heard secret music,” says Salome in her monologue to the severed head of John the Baptist. Richard Strauss’s opera trades in the unseeable and the unknowable—from the range of metaphors applied to the moon to the nearly impossible staging of a ten-minute striptease performed by a dramatic soprano—which makes it unusually well suited to concert presentation. Strauss’ high-octane, atmospheric music can seem all the more lurid and mysterious when its subjective visualization is left to the imagination.Read full review... | |