On Friday 19 January, the talent of Nadia Boulanger, acknowledged as the most influential teacher of classical music in the 20th century, was affirmed. As a composer. At the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre in Athens the premiere of an...
Carmen via The Metropolitan Opera It was a bad night at the office for Polish tenor, Piotr Beczala. On 5 January 2024, a date that will live in opera infamy, singing the role of Don José in Bizet’s Carmen at New York’s Met, the talented tenor’s voice...
Joyce DiDonato IS Agrippina. The American mezzo soprano bores full beam at the audience, hurtling down the tunnel of an obsession to have her cokehead son, Nerone, installed as Emperor of Rome. From the moment she sashays onstage in a sassy, figure-hugging cocktail...
The first Arab opera written by an Arab composer, Tar El Bahr, The Sea Treasures, by Egyptian, Monir Elweseimy, will not yet be on any reader’s list of favourites. How could it be? It premiered only last week, at The Royal Opera House, Muscat, Oman, to much...
The focal point of Maria Stuarda, Gaetano Donizetti’s opera premiered at la Scala, Milan, in 1835, is the exchange between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots at a contrived meeting on the purlieu of Fotheringhay Castle, Norfolk. Discount, for a moment,...
The Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux dominates its surroundings. So it should. It has stood majestically, as the link between the medieval cité and the northern quartiers which blossomed in the 19th century, since 1778. The architect, Victor Luis, gave his provincial...
The production of Alban Berg’s opera, Wozzeck, playing at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, is sensational, mind-bending, ground-breaking. As ground-breaking as Berg’s confrontational atonal style was when it burst into an unsuspecting, post-romantic world in...
KIEV, UKRAINE – SEPTEMBER 24, 2016: Independence Square – Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kiev, Ukraine. My lunch companion pulled two Israeli IWI Jericho 541 handguns from his briefcase and plonked them on the bench. “What do you think? Needed in Donbas, you know”. Bloody...
Santa’s right arm drew back, then delivered a powerful haymaker between Rudolph’s antlers. The festive pair, locked in sudden unseasonal animosity, tumbled onto the shiny, sleet-soaked sidewalk of East 33rd Street, close to Manhattan’s Greely Square Park. Moments...
Last Saturday I heard Lise Davidsen, the 32-year-old Norwegian lyric-dramatic soprano, sing her debut role at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Lisa, in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades. She started the afternoon a relative unknown. By curtain call she held...
“I’m an Angel, First Class – how’ya doin”? I am behind stage at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, touring the set of Jake Heggie’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”, a brave – brave? What am I talking about? – heroically risky remake of the beloved James Stewart...
San Francisco Opera’s Christmas offering, Englebert Humperdinck’s 1893 Hansel and Gretel, ain’t no traditional fairy tale. This co-production with the Royal Opera House Covent Garden plays up serious social themes illuminated by Herr Humperdinck in a libretto by...