| Date and venue | Title | Submitted by |
|---|---|---|
| 17-Apr-2013 Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts | David Alden's edgy Lucia di Lammermoor triumphs in Toronto | Stanley Fefferman |
 Everything about the opening scene of this production set me on edge: centre-stage a hybrid bed on wheels, part crib part hospital, and propped up on it, peering through the bars, a young female, presumably Lucia. The set is a high-walled room, dingy white, plaster stained, paper peeling, with a short door and elongated windows suggesting a surreal Alice-in-Wonderland distortion.Read full review... | ||
| 16-Apr-2013 Blacks | Donizetti as you've never seen him before: Pop-Up Opera at Blacks in Soho | Sarah Reid |
 The tiny room at the top of Soho members’ club Blacks is not the first venue most directors would choose to stage an opera, but Pop-Up Opera is not an ordinary production company. Established only two years ago by Guildhall School of Music and Drama graduate Clementine Lovell (playing café owner Adina in this production), the company aims to bring a traditionally exclusive art form out of the opera house and into the lives of average people.Read full review... | ||
| 9-Mar-2013 Hackney Empire | Donizetti re-done: The Siege of Calais with English Touring Opera in Hackney | Paul Kilbey |
 A very concise, two-act opera which tells a bleak wartime tale of sacrifice, rarely performed and never realised to the satisfaction of its own composer. You could be forgiven for thinking I was describing something from 20th-century Germany, perhaps an expressionist work taking after Berg’s Wozzeck or similar. You’d be wrong. It’s by Donizetti, and English Touring Opera are currently presenting this opera’s first ever professional British production, having started their tour this weekend at Hackney Empire.
Read full review... | ||
| 12-Feb-2013 King's Head Theatre, Islington | L'elisir d'amore with OperaUpClose | Emily Owen |
 Donizetti’s melodramma giocoso in two acts, L’elisir d’amore, is a light-hearted tale of love overcoming all obstacles, with the help of a little “love potion”. Tonight’s performance, in the intimate space of the King’s Head Theatre, was updated to Hollywood: the beautiful actress Adina (Una Reynolds) is being courted by Sergeant Belcore (Marc Callahan), who wants her as a “trophy wife” – much to the dismay of the lowly gardener Nemorino (Alex Vearey-Roberts), who is completely, heartbreakingly, in love with Adina.Read full review... | ||
| 26-Jan-2013 San Diego Civic Theatre | San Diego Opera's season opening Daughter of the Regiment is a crowd-pleaser | Matthew Richard Martinez |
 Chicks dig the high notes. The enduring popularity of Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment seems to indicate as much. The plot is silly (even by opera’s standards) and much of the music is not as memorable as some of Donizetti’s more popular works. Yet even without the notorious Ah! mes amis and its nine high C’s, the charming work can be a crowd-pleaser as evidenced by San Diego Opera’s season opening performance Saturday evening.
Read full review... | ||
| 19-Jan-2013 Lincoln Center: Metropolitan Opera House | The Met live in HD at the Barbican: Maria Stuarda | Emily Owen |
 It was with great curiosity that I set off for the Barbican on Saturday night. I’ve never been to see an opera in the cinema before – I don’t think I’ve even sat through a pre-recorded film of an opera for many years, as I am a great fan of the “real thing”: opera performed live on stage. And yet I was extremely keen to find out what an opera filmed live, in front of a packed audience, and broadcast around the world was like, so off I went!Read full review... | ||
| 17-Jan-2013 Oslo Opera House, Main Stage | Don Pasquale at the Norwegian National Opera | Aksel Tollåli |
 What do you get when you mix an old man with a penchant for younger women, a young woman, her equally young lover and a scheming doctor, and set it all sometime around the 1960s, although you wouldn’t really know it had it not been for the petticoats? A rather successful night at the opera, it would seem.
Read full review... | ||
| 25-Nov-2012 Civic Opera House | Don Pasquale sparkles at the Lyric Opera of Chicago | Kristina Powers |
 The human race craves comic relief... a universally accepted fact throughout the entire history of mankind. Comic books, sitcoms, comic theater... all seek to blissfully whisk us out of the doldrums and politics of today’s ever-busy society. Although opera is often stereotyped as completely tragic, stuffy, and elitist fare, it too contains countless comic gems, including Gaetano Donizetti’s perennial favorite Don Pasquale.Read full review... | ||
| 13-Nov-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Donizetti's elixir is still a winning formula at Covent Garden | David Karlin |
 ASHMORE-bt.jpg) Take one hapless but lovable hero, one capricious but ultimately vulnerable heroine, a doctor and an army officer straight out of commedia dell’arte, a couple of basso buffo patter songs, at least one memorable romantic ballad, and stir the lot into a good lashing of boisterous Italian music with a sprinkling of furtive tears. Donizetti’s formula for L’Elisir d’Amore may not have made all the girls fall at his feet, it did bring him money and enduring fame beyond even the wildest predictions that could have been made by the quack Dr. Dulcamara.
Read full review... | ||
| 28-Oct-2012 Barbican Centre: Hall | Donizetti's Belisario at the Barbican | Emily Owen |
 The second collaboration between Opera Rara and the BBC Symphony Orchestra brought a starry cast to the Barbican Centre on Sunday evening for a revival of Donizetti’s tragic opera Belisario. Written in 1836, immediately after the triumph of Lucia di Lammermoor, it was an instant success following its première at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice and remained in the repertoire for several decades.Read full review... | ||
| 21-Oct-2012 Opéra Bastille | An operatic high-note: Donizetti's La Fille du Régiment comes home to Paris | Leopold Tobisch |
 From time to time, audiences are presented with what I consider to be a rare event, a “dream” performer: one so convincing in his or her role that they become an ideal, establishing a standard to which all following interpretations will inevitably be compared – for example, Jacqueline du Pré’s interpretation of Elgar’s Cello Concerto has become a timeless benchmark.
Read full review... | ||
| 28-Sep-2012 Sydney Opera House: Opera Theatre | Emma Matthews delivers in Opera Australia's Lucia di Lammermoor | David Larkin |
.jpg) For many opera fans, especially here in Australia, the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor is indelibly connected with the late, much lamented Joan Sutherland. She made her breakthrough as Lucia in a Covent Garden production of 1959, and continued to sing the part for over three decades, thankfully leaving several celebrated recordings. All eyes and ears were therefore on Emma Matthews on Friday night, as she took on the role in a new production of Donizetti’s masterpiece at the Sydney Opera House.Read full review... | ||
| 15-Sep-2012 Kennedy Center: Opera House | Sondra Radvanovsky shines in Washington National Opera's Anna Bolena | Raisa Massuda, mandolinvision.blogspot.com |
 Ladies and gentlemen of Washington DC and the nearby lands!
If last fall you did not get a chance to journey to New York for the Met’s season-opening production of Anna Bolena – do not fret! Last Saturday the Washington National Opera opened its new season with a production of Anna Bolena (a little too bloody for a season opening if you ask me, but maybe that’s what attracts most people to opera these days).
Read full review... | ||
| 16-Jun-2012 Royal Northern College of Music | Opera Seria's debut production of Anna Bolena: A tremendous achievement | Richard Wilcocks |
 Lust, betrayal, beheadings. The words appeared prominently in the publicity for Opera Seria’s debut production of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, bringing Horrible Histories fleetingly to mind, but they do sum up the plot of one of the composer’s greatest works rather well. Henry VIII is intent on freeing himself from Anne Boleyn, his second wife, and has Jane Seymour, her lady-in-waiting, lined up to be his third. His plan is to find ‘evidence’ that Anne is adulterous by inviting her first love, Lord Richard Percy, back to England from exile.Read full review... | ||
| 13-Jun-2012 Birmingham Symphony Hall | Bryn Terfel: Life and soul of the party at Symphony Hall's 21st | Katherine Dixson, katherinedixson.co.uk |
 Here’s a pertinent fact for a classical music website: in 1991, when the wonderful World Wide Web was poised to ensnare anyone with computer access, Birmingham’s Symphony Hall opened its doors to the concert-going public for the first time. It quickly won critical acclaim with artists from across the globe and it’s known as one of the best anywhere. Patrons love it, and tonight’s capacity audience found itself caught up in a spirit of celebration. Striking flowers adorned the stage, and the chrome on Andris Nelsons’ podium seemed to have added sparkle.Read full review... | ||
| 7-Jun-2012 Holland Park Theatre | Elvira Fatykhova shines in a windswept Lucia di Lammermoor | David Karlin |
 Howling, gusting wind. Damp, bitter cold. Dark, gathering twilight. Exactly the right atmosphere, you must agree, for Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, based on Sir Walter Scott's romantic historical novel of dark deeds in the grim castles of the Scottish clans, which opened Opera Holland Park's new season.
Read full review... | ||
| 8-May-2012 The Haverford School: Centennial Hall | AVA’s memorable "L'Elisir d'Amore" with outstanding tenor Diego Silva | Gale Martin, operatoonity.com |
 Though most of Gaetano Donizetti’s operas are not well known, Donizetti wrote dozens of them – many of the silly variety. L’Elisir d’Amore is one frothy work that not only survived, but continues to be performed around the world – frequently. L’Elisir d’Amore has a formulaic storyline: it’s war time (pick a war, any war). A lonely boy falls for a very pretty girl. The pretty girl plays hard to get. The boy drinks a love potion. Circumstances and a soldier in a snappy uniform keep boy and girl apart until the boy inherits a fortune.Read full review... | ||
| 19-Apr-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | La Fille du Régiment at Covent Garden | David Karlin |
 The nationality of Gaetano Donizetti's La Fille du Régiment is as confused as that of its eponymous heroine. Written by a homesick Italian expatriate for that most Parisian of venues the Opéra-Comique, it both continued Donizetti's Italian colonisation of the Paris opera scene (much bemoaned by Berlioz) and showed him adapting his style to the conventions of French theatre.
Read full review... | ||
| 10-Nov-2011 Kennedy Center: Opera House | Lucia in Washington: The House Always Wins | Raisa Massuda, mandolinvision.blogspot.com |
 On Thursday night the DC opera fans gathered at the Washington National Opera for the opening night of David Alden’s production of Donizetti’s timeless tale of love and horror, Lucia di Lammermoor. It soon became obvious that the production presented to us was not the most conservative one. Immersed in pitch black darkness with but a thin ray of light across the wall, the stage was anything but easy to look at. Alden’s production transported us into the house of eternal twilight – the house of the Ashtons.Read full review... | ||
| 22-Oct-2011 Civic Opera House | A Dark and Stormy Night at the Lyric Opera of Chicago | Kristina Powers |
 "It was a dark and stormy night …." Chuckling whenever I hear these lines, I can see Charles Schultz’s beloved Snoopy staring intensely at his typewriter, vigorously typing away what he would consider his magnum opus novel. Not surprisingly, in countless titanic masterworks of literature and music, the foreboding stormy night setting serves as a metaphor and eloquent dropback for a stormy situation within the drama of the story. Such is the case with Gaetano Donzietti’s epic magnum opus, Lucia di Lammermoor.Read full review... | ||
| 15-Sep-2011 The London Coliseum | The ENO's Elixir of Love | Intermezzo |
 For all their eagerness to embrace the new and radical, ENO are often at their best in more traditional fare. Jonathan Miller's delightful production, first seen last season, charms more than it challenges with a candy-coloured evocation of a more innocent age. The apple pie America of a 1950s prairie diner replaces the 19th century Italian village of Donizetti's original.Read full review... | ||
| 30-Jul-2011 Highclere Castle | Bangs for your Buck - The Battle Proms at Highclere Castle. | Andrew Benson-Wilson |
 I have to confess that an event like this is not within my normal musical radar. My music reviewing and listening is predominantly serious classical, and most of it is for a specialist part of that wide repertoire. So it was a slightly brave, or foolhardy, idea to offer to review one of these musical spectaculars at my local castle. The Battle Proms have been going since 1997 and run at six well-known country house venues during July and August.Read full review... | ||
| 17-Jul-2011 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Venice - six scenes, ten young singers. | Katy S Austin |
 RICHARD H. SMITH 2011.jpg) A split-level stage featuring an ornate stairwell and scaffolding was the setting for this the tenth Jette Parker Young Artists’ Summer Performance. Entitled ‘Veneziana’, the specially compiled programme embodied the visions of Venice dreamt by Rossini, Donizetti, Britten and Offenbach in six sets of Opera Scenes. Greek-born Rodula Gaitano directed ten young singers in a selection of impassioned Venetian scenes from the nineteenth to twentieth-century opera repertory.Read full review... | ||
| 9-Jun-2011 Holland Park Theatre | Bonynge and Lee serve up tons of fun in Opera Holland Park's Don Pasquale | David Karlin |
 Gaetano Donizetti's commedia dell'arte-inspired Don Pasquale is one of the favourites in the opera buffa repertoire. At its ending, the assembled company boisterously enjoin us to remember that when an elderly man marries a much younger woman, no good can result.
Read full review... | ||
| 9-Jun-2011 Guildhall School Theatre | Double Bill to delight. | Hilary Fisher |
 Donizetti’s one act opera, Rita, composed in 1841 formed the first half of last night’s double bill at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. The second half comprised another late work, Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, composed in 1891 to a libretto by Tchaikovsky’s brother, Modest.
Read full review... | ||
| 13-May-2011 Kennedy Center: Opera House | The Recipe of True Happiness | Raisa Massuda, mandolinvision.blogspot.com |
 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... | ||
| 6-May-2011 Cutler Majestic Theatre | Maria Padilla Claims Her Crown At Opera Boston | Susan Blood |
 Donizetti's Maria Padilla is a canvas for sumptuous costumes, regal staging and bel canto voices. The royal court, the wedding finery and the homes of Spanish nobility add up to a visual feast. Even without all this, the opera stands up musically. While some operas benefit (or are saved) by a grand production, Maria Padilla passes the “in the car” test. I sometimes ask myself if I would listen to a particular opera in the car, or if its charm stays on the stage at the end of the evening. This music is gorgeous and illustrative, evoking the story and images.Read full review... | ||
| 26-Mar-2011 Lincoln Center: David H Koch Theater | NYC ‘Elixir’ Cures Opera Ho-Hum | Gale Martin, operatoonity.com |
 When attending professional opera, patrons can and should expect to see a solid production, strong singing, and elevated production values—a well-rounded show that leaves them more satisfied than not. At the professional level, opera is a commercial transaction around an artistic product. But deep down, we're all hoping for something beyond sheer transaction—a glimmer of greatness—a moment to remember.
Read full review... | ||
| 31-Jan-2011 The London Coliseum | Mike Figgis directs Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia at the ENO | David Karlin |
 The ENO's production of Donizetti's "melodrama in a prologue and two acts" Lucrezia Borgia is notable for two reasons. Firstly, it's a new production of an opera by a major bel canto composer, but one that isn't performed all that often. Secondly, it's the operatic debut of acclaimed film director Mike Figgis.
Read full review... | ||
| 20-Jan-2011 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | Rosenblatt Recitals: Juan Diego Flórez | paulguest |
| Juan Diego Flórez is one of the world’s most respected bel canto tenors. He has sung roles from Verdi to Donzetti operas and his performance of Pour mon ame... Ah mes amis from Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment at La Scala in Milan in 2007 broke the theatre’s 74 year old tradition of no encores.
Read full review... | ||
| 18-Jul-2010 Foundling Museum, Brunswick Square | Louise Kemeny and Rupert Compston | Sebastian Scotney |
 Recital of songs/ arias by Britten/ Bellini/ Donizetti/ Schubert/ Debussy
Louise Kemeny brings a level of intellect and thoughtfulness to sung texts which is probably unique among young singers. She has to her name both a Masters degree in renaissance literature, and a scholarly article about newly-installed Oxford Poetry Professor Geoffrey Hill.
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| 1-Jun-2010 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Natalie Dessay sings Donizetti's La Fille du Régiment | David Karlin |
COOPER.jpg) Natalie Dessay has been making a real signature role out of Marie, Donizetti's foundling "Daughter of the Regiment" who turns out to be of noble birth (well, partly, wherein lies the tale). We went to Covent Garden last night specially to see her, and she didn't disappoint: her performance was quite out of the ordinary.
Read full review... | ||
