Southern opera festival marred by massacre of Strauss

Southern opera festival marred by massacre of Strauss

Charleston is a whizz of a town. This is my third visit for the annual Spoleto Festival. I stay in the old French Quarter, a delightful mishmash of narrow, rickety streets with uneven sidewalks. At night gas lamps flicker. Each crowding house is different, many with...

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Verdi’s Rigoletto is the cruellest opera

Verdi’s Rigoletto is the cruellest opera

“Rigoletto is the cruellest opera, breeding Tragedy out of dead minds, mixing Amorality and desire, stirring Numbed moral sense with easy death.” Apologies to Thomas Stearns Eliot. And on that cheery note, on the first day of spring, a sunny, equinoctial day in New...

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Unearthing a Manhattan opera jewel to rival the Met

Unearthing a Manhattan opera jewel to rival the Met

It’s not far, as the crow flies, from the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, Manhattan Midtown, to The Flea Theater, Thomas Street, Tribeca; 25 minutes by rattly subway. But, for a softie Met regular it might as well have been a different planet. Why the...

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There’s nothing quite like the Wexford opera festival

There’s nothing quite like the Wexford opera festival

“Are you prepared to slay a mighty dragon, rescue a fair young maid from a harem, bake an Italian cake and take a tilt at windmills? Then you’re ready for Wexford Festival Opera 2019”. Assume the answer is “yes”. So says Ian Fox, on an introductory CD accompanying...

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The bad guys win in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea

The bad guys win in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea

The gleaming white building – a giant beached whale of a building, perched on a glittering lake shore, pointing eastward across sunlit blue water, basking on a crystal clear day – unexpectedly moved. It slowly beat its wings. No, I’m not on the Canadian tokes. I’ve...

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Verdi’s Falstaff proves he could write comic opera

Verdi’s Falstaff proves he could write comic opera

Falstaff is Giuseppe’s Verdi’s last, sizzling “hurrah”; a mould-breaking “hurrah” at that. Almost eighty when he wrote it in 1893, Verdi surprisingly chose a comedy as the capstone of his triumphant career, only the second out of a repertoire of 28 works; the other...

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The Rest is Opera:

Making opera fun for those of us who ain’t aficianados!

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