| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 21-Apr-2013 New York City Center | New York City Opera closes season with Alden's riotous La Périchole |
 Henri Bergson famously defined comedy as “something mechanical encrusted on the living”. One suspects that Jacques Offenbach would have been a fan of this definition, and that Christopher Alden most certainly is. Alden’s new production of La Périchole, which closes the New York City Opera’s season, is strange, abrasive, and also extremely funny, careening past the everyday to end up somewhere deeply bizarre.
Read full review... | |
| 17-Apr-2013 Brooklyn Academy of Music: Howard Gilman Opera House | Les Arts Florissants bring a stunning David et Jonathas to BAM |
 New York is again lucky to host William Christie and Les Arts Florissants at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Their visits are always special, and it’s not just because the unique nature of their repertory – Baroque opera, usually French, which is neglected by most of New York’s major companies – nor the virtuosic ease with which they embody this otherwise-foreign idiom. Their productions have a passionate unity of purpose and a loving, handcrafted quality that somehow seems antithetical to many of our more slick and snarky local efforts.Read full review... | |
| 14-Apr-2013 New York City Center | New York City Opera's Moses in Egypt thinks big |
 In recent seasons, the New York City Opera has largely limited itself to chamber operas. Its newest production marks a renewed ambition: Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto, a proto grand opera that ends with nothing less than the parting of the Red Sea. Fortunately this scrappy but worthwhile performance showed that the company can tackle large-scale works on its own terms, albeit with a few stumbles along the way.
Read full review... | |
| 6-Apr-2013 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Elina Garanča's NYC recital debut is calm, cool and collected |
 Elina Garanča can always be counted on for a coolly polished performance. Her silvery mezzo is beautiful, even throughout her range, and impeccably on pitch. She is musically tasteful, and her sound has grown in recent years. But something often seems to be missing. While she’s too accomplished to call bland, her performances rarely show evidence of a beating heart. On Saturday night, her Carnegie Hall recital debut kept in character, showing an excellent singer rather than an effective communicator.
Read full review... | |
| 23-Mar-2013 The Box | Cavalli goes disco in Gotham Chamber Opera's Eliogabalo |
 Describing its new production of Francesco Cavalli’s 1668 opera Eliogabalo, the Gotham Chamber Opera compares the exploits of titular depraved Roman emperor Heliogabalus to Salome. There’s an obvious mistake here: Salome is an opera; Heliogabalus was a historical figure. While the Gotham Chamber Opera has done a valuable service by bringing this compelling, interesting opera onstage, the production unfortunately makes the same mistake, confusing a few historical accounts with the very different aesthetic of 17th-century Venetian opera.
Read full review... | |
| 28-Feb-2013 Lincoln Center: Avery Fisher Hall | New York Philharmonic's Carousel a real classic |
 While musicals are normally outside the purview of major symphony orchestras, fans of Rodgers and Hammerstein can only be grateful for the New York Philharmonic’s beautiful staging of Carousel, currently onstage at Avery Fisher Hall. Broadway has changed a lot since Carousel premièred in 1945, and the big voices, big string sections, and homespun spirit that the Philharmonic has brought to this five-performance run arguably serve the material better than today’s Great White Way could. It is a treat to hear this score performed so well.
Read full review... | |
| 24-Feb-2013 Brooklyn Academy of Music: Howard Gilman Opera House | New York City Opera's Turn of the Screw says too much |
 Benjamin Britten’s 1954 opera The Turn of the Screw is a sensible choice for the New York City Opera: its chamber orchestration and emotional intimacy make it unsuitable for production by the Met Opera (against which every other company in town must define itself), and its claustrophobia would seem to offer a great opportunity for one of the company’s more innovative directors to create something creepy and unexpected. It also enjoys the name recognition to fill seats – which has, unfortunately, been an issue for the company’s more adventurous recent efforts.Read full review... | |
| 6-Jan-2013 Lincoln Center: Avery Fisher Hall | Roberto Alagna's Andrea Chénier fails to take off at the Lincoln Center |
 Yesterday I went to see a convoluted story about French revolutionaries, as belted out at top volume to serviceable but hardly creative ballads. No, I didn’t go to the Les misérables movie. I went to see Roberto Alagna in Opera Orchestra of New York’s concert presentation of Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chénier.
Read full review... | |
| 5-Dec-2012 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Bellini's Beatrice di Tenda never takes off at Carnegie Hall |
 The prefab riffs of computer programs like GarageBand aren’t entirely new. As shown by the musicologist Robert Gjerdingen, many 18th- and early 19th-century composers used pedagogical materials as a basis for their compositions, “composing out” passages in creative ways. But this method is not something the ordinary listener is supposed to recognize.Read full review... | |
| 12-Sep-2012 Columbia University, Miller Theatre | Le Poème Harmonique at Columbia University |
o matsura.jpg) In his 1995 book Text and Act, the musicologist Richard Taruskin wrote of the historically-informed performance movement, “the very recent concept of historical authenticity is implicitly projected back into historical periods that never knew it.” To be fair to the French group Le Poème Harmonique, whose program “Venezia” opened the Miller Theatre at Columbia University’s season, their press release trumpeted an “eye-opening approach to opera using historical gesture” rather than textual authenticity.Read full review... | |
| 4-Aug-2012 Großes Festspielhaus | La bohème in Salzburg with Netrebko and a tenor surprise |
 When Salzburg Festival director Alexander Pereira stepped onto the stage of the Großes Festspielhaus last night to announce that one of the cast members of La bohème was sick and unable to sing, he faced a chorus of hisses from the audience. Soprano Anna Netrebko, the festival’s biggest non-conductor star, was feeling fine (though as Mimì she would shortly die of consumption). But the excellent tenor Piotr Beczala had decided a mere ten minutes earlier that his vocal cords would not be up to singing Rodolfo that night. We would have to wait forty minutes for a replacement.Read full review... | |
| 3-Aug-2012 Haus für Mozart | Ariadne auf Naxos dismantled at the Salzburg Festival |
 Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos was first performed in 1912, in a production directed by Max Reinhardt. Unlike the version usually seen today, this first Ariadne was a long-winded play-opera-ballet hybrid, incorporating a full production of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme with dances to incidental music by Strauss followed by the short opera. Less than a decade later these three men would found the Salzburg Festival, so it seems only appropriate that the festival is celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Ariadne.Read full review... | |
| 20-Jul-2012 Prinzregententheater | Mozart's Mitridate in Munich through a child's eyes |
 Mozart wrote the opera seria Mitridate at the age of fifteen. The Bayerische Staatsoper’s clever and strangely beautiful production positions it as the work of a child, full of rebellious teenagers and projected scenery seemingly drawn from a primary school art class. But unfortunately even excellent singing and much directorial invention cannot disguise that this is a rather bland opera, and its four hours pass slowly.
Read full review... | |
| 8-Jul-2012 Odeonsplatz | Un-Italian weather thwarts Bavarian Radio Symphony's "Notte Italiana" |
.jpg) An old proverb names Munich as the northernmost city in Italy. As odd as this may seem, it makes some sense when considering the arches of the mock-Italian loggia in Odeonsplatz, modeled after the one in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. It was fitting that this was the setting for the Klassik am Odeonsplatz's final concert, a so-called "Notte Italiana" ("Italian night"), featuring the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks (BRSO) conducted by Andris Nelsons, along with soprano Kristine Opolais and tenor Joseph Calleja.
Read full review... | |
| 17-Jun-2012 Semperoper | Fidelio an enduring ode to freedom in Dresden |
 The Dresden Semperoper premiered a new production of Fidelio scarcely a month before the fall of East Germany. Much has changed in the intervening decade and a bit, but the Semperoper is still playing the same Fidelio. It doesn't take much knowledge of recent German history to understand why it was a sensation at the time.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... | |
| 12-May-2012 El Museo del Barrio | New York City Opera brings Telemann's Orpheus back from the dead |
 The New York City Opera has spent the season reinventing itself from a large company with a large theater to a peripatetic one presenting small works. Perhaps it was apt that they closed their season with Telemann’s Orpheus. Not only was it one of the first stagings of any Telemann opera in the United States: it also presents a radically reworking of a familiar story that seems unwilling to confine itself to one geographic location.
Read full review... | |
| 10-May-2012 Kimmel Center, Perelman Theater | Christian Gerhaher and András Schiff: A true musical partnership |
 Among the audience at Thursday night’s Philadelphia Chamber Music Society recital, it seemed few had heard of baritone Christian Gerhaher. They had come for the excellent reason of András Schiff playing the piano. But by the end of the evening it was clear that neither name would be soon forgotten. In a warhorse-heavy program of Beethoven, Schumann, and Haydn, they were an exceptionally subtle and accomplished team.
Read full review... | |
| 8-Apr-2012 Lincoln Center: Alice Tully Hall | Anna Caterina Antonacci Casts a Spell over New York |
 This Easter, New Yorkers had a rare chance to hear soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci in Alice Tully Hall. It was only Antonacci’s second appearance in the city, but based on the warm welcome she received from the audience, her reputation preceded her. And by the end of this outstanding recital, it was clear that the city has been missing out on her artistry.
Read full review... | |
| 29-Mar-2012 Kimmel Center for Performing Arts, Verizon Hall | Esa-Pekka Salonen with the Philadelphia Orchestra |
 When a guest conductor arrives for a few concerts with an orchestra, he or she doesn’t have very much time to shape his or her interpretation. On some occasions the orchestra successfully adopts the visitor’s style; on others they just play like they always do. In Esa-Pekka Salonen’s concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra last night, the program of Debussy, Bartók, and the Finnish conductor’s own Violin Concerto was more the maestro’s style (cool modernist) than the orchestra’s (rather conservative and Romantic). The playing, however, was mostly typically Philadelphia.Read full review... | |
| 16-Mar-2012 Kimmel Center, Perelman Theater | Curtis students excel in a rare Henze revival in Philadelphia |
 “What a funny kind of fairy tale we’ve gotten into!” proclaims one of the characters in Elegy for Young Lovers, Hans Werner Henze’s odd 1963 opera. The audience may sympathize. W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman’s libretto of an uninspired poet in search of a new muse is not standard operatic fare. Despite the familiar plot devices of a love triangle, a madwoman, and a blizzard (well, the latter is not so common), its elusive tone and Henze’s kaleidoscopically shifting score are hard to pin down to any operatic school.Read full review... | |
| 15-Mar-2012 Carnegie Hall, Zankel Hall | L'Arpeggiata: Inspired by the Baroque |
 Though they play Baroque music, the ensemble L’Arpeggiata is more like a jazz band than a traditional orchestra. Anchored by a continuo (rhythm section?) led by artistic director and theorbist Christina Pluhar, they are joined by various other instrumentalists, singers, and even dancers, fitting each of their projects. Using improvisation and felicitous combinations of traditions, they explore various forgotten repertoires from the Neapolitan tarantella to, on Thursday evening at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, the Baroque mystery play.
Read full review... | |
| 23-Feb-2012 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic study musical portraiture |
 The composers Debussy, Dvořák, Schoenberg and Elgar and aren’t often associated with each other, but they featured together in the first of three concerts in Carnegie Hall with Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. The works on the program, it turned out, all dated from the 1890s and all were program music. But Rattle and the orchestra, while technically flawless, only seemed to connect with the material at some points.
Read full review... | |
| 29-Jan-2012 Lincoln Center: Avery Fisher Hall | The Opera Orchestra of New York's grand concert of Wagner's grand Rienzi |
 Early works by major composers can be fascinating. We try to see in them premonitions of the greatness to come, or hope they will cast light on a more familiar later work. The Opera Orchestra of New York’s concert presentation of Rienzi, Richard Wagner’s third opera, was fairly useless in this regard: most of Rienzi sounds nothing like mature Wagner. But it justifies itself on its own merits, a grand opera of impressive effect and achievement. This scrappy but exciting performance sometimes rose to the occasion.
Read full review... | |
| 26-Jan-2012 Lincoln Center: Rose Theater | Opera Lafayette revives an 18th-century comic gem |
 Opera Lafayette has uncovered a fascinating work in their revival of Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny’s 1762 comic opera Le roi et le fermier (The King and the Farmer). The Washington, D.C.-based company is dedicated to “the French 18th-century opera repertoire and its precursors, influences, and artistic legacy,” and presented a single performance on tour in Lincoln Center’s Rose Theatre before taking it to Versailles next week.
Read full review... | |
| 8-Dec-2011 Lincoln Center: Avery Fisher Hall | Daniel Harding, Joshua Bell, and the New York Philharmonic's Russian evening |
 Deutsche Grammophon Harald Hoffmann.jpg) For one of the most iconic works in the art music repertoire, The Rite of Spring actually isn’t performed very often. This week it made a welcome appearance on a New York Philharmonic program under the baton of British conductor Daniel Harding.Read full review... | |
| 19-Nov-2011 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Marin Alsop revives Honegger's Joan of Arc |
 The short life and terrifying death of Joan of Arc are the subject of Arthur Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher ("Joan of Arc at the Stake"), a curious masterpiece of an oratorio dating from 1938. The nearly-forgotten work received a well-deserved resurrection by Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on Saturday night.
Read full review... | |
| 13-Nov-2011 Lincoln Center: Avery Fisher Hall | Fabio Luisi and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra bring grace to warhorses |
 The Italian conductor Fabio Luisi has become an increasingly familiar and welcome face to New York audiences. Recently appointed Principal Conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, he is primarily known here as an operatic conductor. But he has also been the chief conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra (known as the Wiener Symphoniker in German) since 2005, and on Sunday the Viennese joined him in Avery Fisher Hall. While the warhorse program recalled the taste of the city’s other major orchestra--the arch-conservative Vienna Philharmonic--it was a fine afternoon.
Read full review... | |
| 8-Nov-2011 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Gheorghiu and Kaufmann bring romance to Carnegie Hall in Adriana Lecouvreur |
 “I will return! I want to again be intoxicated by the triumphant smile of art!” proclaims the actress Adriana Lecouvreur in the extravagant opera of the same title. With this role, the soprano Angela Gheorghiu returned to New York in the first performance of the Opera Orchestra of New York’s Carnegie Hall season. After financial difficulties the company itself has been making a comeback as well, under new musical director Alberto Veronesi. For over 40 years, the group has produced concert performance of lesser-known operas with outstanding casts, and this evening was a fine continuation of that tradition, with strong performances from Jonas Kaufmann, Ambrogio Maestri, and Anita Rachvelishvili in the other major roles.
Read full review... | |
| 11-Oct-2011 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Mariinsky Orchestra celebrates youthful energy |
 On Tuesday night, St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Orchestra and their ubiquitous music director Valery Gergiev closed a series of concerts at Carnegie Hall. Part of the hall’s fall “Tchaikovsky in St. Petersburg” festival, the program included works by Prokofiev and Shostakovich as well as Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1.
Read full review... | |
| 18-Sep-2011 Brooklyn Academy of Music: Howard Gilman Opera House | Atys, an opera fit for a king |
 In 1676, Louis XIV’s court composer, Jean-Baptiste Lully, wrote Atys, an unusually tragic opera that became a favorite of the king. In 1987, William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants revived it in an acclaimed series of performances in Paris and eventually at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Like Louis XIV centuries before, modern audiences were enchanted by the work’s austere, pure declamation, grand choruses, and graceful dances and its success was again influential.Read full review... | |
| 1-Aug-2011 Großes Festspielhaus | The Salzburg Festival's Die Frau ohne Schatten |
 Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal began their collaboration on Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow) with utopian ambitions. Unfortunately they weren’t the same ones. For Hofmannsthal, this would finally be the opera where his poetry would be illuminated by rather than buried under the music. For Strauss, this was to be his magnum opus, the self-proclaimed “last Romantic opera” that would cement his place in musical history.Read full review... | |
| 8-Jul-2011 Deutsche Oper | Klaus Florian Vogt impresses in Wagner at the Deutsche Oper |
 In recent years the German tenor Klaus Florian Vogt has gained fame for his lyrical portrayals of Wagnerian characters like Lohengrin, Parsifal, and Walther von Stolzing in Die Meisteresinger von Nürnberg. His concert at the Deutsche Oper Berlin with conductor Peter Schneider and the house orchestra showed a wider range of repertoire, but it is still in his home Wagnerian territory that his greatest strengths lie.
Read full review... | |
| 19-Jun-2011 Westergasfabriek: Gashouder | Wolfgang Rihm's Dionysos makes Nietzsche sing |
 Friedrich Nietzsche’s life was not that of an isolated contemplative but rather full of personal frustration, eventually ending in syphilitic madness. While his work has been often linked with music--most notably in his relationship with Wagner and Richard Strauss’s tone poem based on Also sprach Zarathustra--making his life into an opera may seem a dubious proposition. But that is exactly what Dionysos, a new music theater work by Wolfgang Rihm that is currently being seen at the Holland Festival, attempts to do.
Read full review... | |
| 14-Jun-2011 Opéra Bastille | Otello in Paris, a night for the singers |
 Otello, Verdi’s penultimate opera, is a tightly-wound setting of Shakespeare’s familiar tragedy. From the opening storm to the title character dying upon a kiss, it is more fragmentary and emotionally cool than his earlier work, an opera that tends to be more admired than loved. The demanding leading roles, choruses, and orchestral writing pose a formidable challenge for any opera house, and it is performed relatively infrequently. But the Opéra National de Paris’s current revival is a welcome opportunity to savor its musical riches, thanks to some first-class singing.
Read full review... | |
| 29-May-2011 Theater an der Wien | Luc Bondy's dark Festwochen Rigoletto in Vienna |
 If director Luc Bondy has a muse, it’s the Georgian baritone George Gagnidze, blessed with a bulging eyes and a big, craggy voice. After growling and sneering his way through Scarpia in Bondy’s much-maligned Metropolitan Opera production of “Tosca,” Gagnidze is back to do the same to the title role of “Rigoletto” in Bondy’s new production at the Wiener Festwochen. While Gagnidze’s Scarpia was seen as shockingly grimy, his equally scuzzy Rigoletto is rather conventional. Similarly, this visually stark production does little to shock or disturb.Read full review... | |
| 5-May-2011 Volksoper Vienna | “Der König Kandaules,” the Volksoper’s Zemlinsky mystery |
 A ring of invisibility found in a giant fish. A voyeuristic king. A fisherman’s burning house and unfaithful wife. Alexander Zemlinsky’s Der König Kandaules is an exceptionally strange opera. Based on André Gide’s 1899 play of the same title, it is a heady mix of sex, violence, and remarkably beautiful music. In the Volksoper’s remarkable revival, its allusiveness alternately fascinates and alienates, drawing the viewer in only to reward them with yet more mysteries.
Read full review... | |
| 21-Apr-2011 Theater an der Wien | The Theater an der Wien’s subtle Dialogues des Carmélites |
 Never a city to shy away from seasonal programming, this Easter Vienna is offering productions of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, Gounod’s Faust, and Wagner’s Parsifal. The latter two, at the Staatsoper, are familiar, but audiences should run to see the Theater an der Wien’s enthralling revival of Poulenc’s relatively rarely-produced masterwork.
Read full review... | |
| 3-Apr-2011 Volksoper Vienna | The Volksoper’s Csárdásfürstin keeps things fun |
 The Volksoper Wien’s first-rate production of “Die Csárdásfürstin” (“The Csárdás Princess”) offers a rare chance to waltz through one of operetta’s most tuneful hits. Emmerich Kálmán’s score, to a libretto by Béla Jenbach, is a frothy concoction of romance, hedonism, and too much time spent in nightclubs. One of the most popular of so-called twentieth-century “Silver Age” operettas (you may recognize the csárdás “Heia in den Bergen” from its renditions by Anna Netrebko), it mixes Hungarian, Viennese, and then-fashionable dance numbers to delicious effect.Read full review... | |
| 22-Mar-2011 Theater an der Wien | The Harnoncourts' Rodelinda |
 Nikolaus Harnoncourt is the elder statesman of the historical performance movement and one of the pillars of Vienna’s musical scene. This season, the Theater an der Wien has already hosted comparative upstart period practice specialists Christophe Rousset, René Jacobs, William Christie and Alan Curtis, so it was only fitting that Harnoncourt and his orchestra, the Concentus Musicus Wien, would also appear. Their excellent production of Handel’s Rodelinda proves that Harnoncourt is still on the top of his game.
Read full review... | |
