August 11, 2023 • 11:29 am Comments Off on Orfeo in Santa Fe
The first of my reviews from Santa Fe Opera’s 2023 season is open through the weekend (no paywall) here. I discuss Yuval Sharon’s extraordinary new production of L’Orfeo (or Orfeo, as they’re calling it), which features new orchestrations commissioned from Nico Muhly.
My review of Tosca is here (but behind the paywall). More reviews upcoming in Opera Now.
Filed under: directors, Monteverdi, Musical America, Puccini, reviews, Santa Fe Opera
July 26, 2022 • 10:53 am Comments Off on Chamber Music at Bravo! Vail
Last night I got my first sample of the chamber side of Bravo! Vail Music Festival with a smart program featuring the Verona Quartet and Artistic Director Anne-Marie McDermott at the keyboard. Puccini’s early “Crisantemi” and the first of Beethoven’s Op. 18 string quartets revealed a flair for finely calibrated ensemble balance and color, with a cross-connection of moods traced between Beethoven’s Adagio and the elegiac Puccini miniature.
For me the highlight was an impassioned performance of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 1 — also a youthful work, in fact written when he was only 18 — for which McDermott joined the Veronese to play the taxing, ever-present piano part with power and poise. Together they made a brilliant case for this shamefully long ignored gem, obviously enjoying the fecundity of Coleridge-Taylor’s imagination. Captivating from start to finish, this is the kind of performance that thankfully is reclaiming his work the repertoire.
Filed under: Beethoven, Bravo! Vail Music Festival, chamber music, Puccini, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
December 7, 2019 • 12:10 pm Comments Off on Opera in San Francisco
Act III of Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel” with Heidi Stober as Gretel and Sasha Cooke as Hansel, production by Antony McDonald; photo: Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera
Filed under: Engelbert Humperdinck, Musical America, Puccini, review, San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Symphony, Wagner
August 8, 2018 • 8:35 am Comments Off on Santa Fe Opera 2018: Ariadne, L’italiana, and Butterfly
ANA MARÍA MARTÍNEZ (MADAME BUTTERFLY) AND JOSHUA GUERRERO (F.B. PINKERTON). PHOTO CREDIT: KEN HOWARD FOR SANTA FE OPERA, 2018
Here’s my report on the rest of the 2018 summer season at Santa Fe Opera* for Musical America. I write about Ariadne auf Naxos, L’italiana in Algeri, and Madama Butterfly. My review of the company’s new production of Doctor Atomic is here.
Santa Fe, NM—-During the long reign of founder John Crosby, Santa Fe Opera cultivated its reputation as a “Strauss house.” Yet only three of the composer’s operas had been presented under the company’s third general director, Charles MacKay, before he decided to include a brand-new production of Ariadne auf Naxos as a key attraction of his farewell season.
continue
[PDF here: Santa Fe 2018 MA reviews]
*Apart from Candide, the one production I had to miss.
Filed under: Musical America, Puccini, review, Rossini, Santa Fe Opera, Strauss
October 4, 2017 • 10:24 am Comments Off on The Memorable Women at San Francisco Opera Continue, with La Traviata and Turandot
Aurelia Florian as Violetta Valéry in Verdi’s “La Traviata.” Photo: Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera
Part two of my reviews of San Francisco Opera’s fall season is now posted on Musical America:
SAN FRANCISCO—Along with a sensational production of Elektra , San Francisco Opera’s lineup so far this season is spotlighting some of the art form’s most gripping female …
continue reading (behind Musical America‘s paywall)
Filed under: Puccini, review, San Francisco Opera, Verdi
August 7, 2017 • 9:00 am Comments Off on Trying to rethink Madame Butterfly at Seattle Opera
Alexey Dolgov (Pinkerton) and Lianna Haroutounian (Cio-Cio-San); photo by Jacob Lucas
My review for Bachtrack of the new Madame Butterfly production opening Seattle Opera’s season:
How well do we really know Madame Butterfly? So iconic that, for some, it’s the archetype of the art form itself, Puccini’s mega-popular opera has recently been coming in for renewed scrutiny.
Filed under: Puccini, review, Seattle Opera
February 16, 2016 • 7:00 am Comments Off on Manon Lescaut at the Met
Here’s my Playbill essay for the Met’s new production of Manon Lescaut:
Following the world premiere of Manon Lescaut on February 1, 1893, thechorus of critical praise included the observation that, with his new opera,“Puccini stands revealed for what he is: one of the strongest, if not the strongest, of the young Italian opera composers.”
continue reading (pdf, see p. 23)
Filed under: essay, Metropolitan Opera, Puccini
November 11, 2014 • 12:01 am 1
On the TB angle in Puccini (for San Francisco Opera’s La bohème:
“But if she’s dying of that dreadful disease, how could she still sing such gorgeous music?” It’s a question opera-goers often get asked when trying to describe what happens at the climax of one of the most beloved works in the repertoire. In the famous scene from the film Moonstruck, the character played by Cher —who is seeing La Bohème for the first time — notices the paradox and declares, “I didn’t know she was going to die!”
But Mimì’s tragic demise isn’t a medical documentary: it’s depicted in the context of a cultural and artistic tradition in which a wide range of diseases — whether of the body or of the mind — carried powerful symbolic meanings. Influenced by the legacy of Italian opera as well as by Wagner, Puccini was intimately familiar with the sudden madness of Donizetti’s Lucia of Lammermoor, the innocent sleepwalking of Amina in Bellini’s La Sonnambula, and the mysteriously festering “wound” that torments Amfortas in Parsifal. Susan Sontag, in her landmark deconstruction of the use of “illness as metaphor,” observed that “sickness has a way of making people ‘interesting’ — which is how ‘romantic’ was originally defined.”
Filed under: opera, Puccini, San Francisco Opera
Arts & Culture Stories from NPR
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 