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...
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...
“Hojotoho heiaha!” It’s the Met’s Wagner Ring Cycle. In 2010, Peter Gelb, controversial managing director of Metropolitan Opera appointed in 2006, put his head on a chopping block and virtually invited critics to hack it off. There were already rumblings at some of...
“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...
It’s been a nightmare getting around New York this week. A measles scare, because anti-vaccine fundamentalists refused to be needled amidst a 285 case outbreak, caused a medical shutdown in gentrified Williamsburg, Brooklyn; then there was an outbreak of TubercuVerdi...
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...
“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...
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...
I’ve just seen an opera from inside a wedding cake. Well, it’s an understandable mistake. France’s Troisième République Palais Garnier confection of an opera house, commissioned by Emperor Napoleon III in 1860, but not completed until 1875 when Napoleon was...
Adriana Lecouvreur is an opera sneered at by cognoscenti. It’s by Italian composer Francesco Cilea, 1866 – 1950, who “composed some decent piano music which is little known”, according to one sniffy commentator. First performed in Milan in 1902, Enrico Caruso starred...
My opera-fanatic friend, whose company I enjoyed at the Met for a performance of Carmen on Monday, sent me a lengthy review the following day – “Pftt!” Never thought four letters could convey so much. Disappointment; dismissal; frustration. This season’s revival of...
“Buy one, get one free”! “BOGOF” – a marketing strategy now condemned by the environmentally overwrought – is a compelling sales gimmick, for soapsuds, socks (a bit complicated as you actually get 4), even opera. So, when the Met went further and announced the staging...