Donizetti
Classical CDs Weekly Special: Callas LiveSaturday, 23 December 2017
Remastered they may be, but the 20 live operas recorded here between 1949 and 1964 vary soundwise from clean at best to atrocious, with all the caprices of stage noise and audience participation seemingly acceptable at the time (so often there's the... Read more... |
Lucia di Lammermoor, Royal Opera review - creepy, violent and intenseTuesday, 31 October 2017
Katie Mitchell’s production of Lucia di Lammermoor opened at Covent Garden in 2016 and now returns for a first revival. Royal Opera were clearly expecting great things, even from the start, and this is the third cast to have presented the show,... Read more... |
ENO's Marvellous Miller in picturesSunday, 20 November 2016
It should have been unmodified rapture: a gathering of English National Opera team members old and new celebrating the doyen of the company's best-selling productions. And, as has always happened with the artistic side of the company, this loving... Read more... |
Maria de Rudenz, Wexford Festival OperaTuesday, 01 November 2016
Given the horrors lurking in the composer’s more familiar operas, the warning that Maria de Rudenz is “perhaps the darkest of Donizetti’s tragedies” carries no little weight. A Gothic spectacular with echoes of The Castle of Otranto and Matthew... Read more... |
Don Giovanni / Pia de' Tolomei, English Touring OperaMonday, 25 April 2016
The curtain is up for the overture to English Touring Opera’s new production of Don Giovanni, but no-one is on stage. Instead, we gaze at Anna Fleischle’s set: a creation in two layers. On the top, elegant Klimt panels glint with gold. Below, and... Read more... |
Lucia di Lammermoor, Royal OperaFriday, 08 April 2016
Lucia di Lammermoor is an opera in which men spend an awful lot of time talking about women, and very little actually talking to them. (Which, if nothing else, ensures a rather more dramatic denouement than a frank conversation about everyone’s... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Buxton Festival: Bloody Lucia, saintly Joan and sweet LouiseSaturday, 25 July 2015
Sunlight bounces off Derbyshire stone, buskers strum on the Pavilion Gardens bandstand and there’s improvised Shakespeare on the streets: it’s Festival time again in Buxton. Frank Matcham’s Opera House doesn’t present a particularly festive... Read more... |
Poliuto, Glyndebourne Festival OperaFriday, 22 May 2015
Fashion is a funny thing, in opera no less than the sartorial trappings that go with it (everything from tight, hipster trews to billowing ballgowns at last night's Glyndebourne season opening, in case you were wondering). Donizetti's classical... Read more... |
The Wild Man of the West Indies, ETO, Hackney EmpireFriday, 13 March 2015
“Do you think they’ve got enough plot to get us through to the end?” I overheard a lady anxiously asking her husband during the interval. It was a fair question. Donizetti’s The Wild Man of the West Indies was written within a year of L’elisir d’... Read more... |
L'Elisir d'Amore, Royal OperaWednesday, 19 November 2014
“Watch out for the dog!” instructs Covent Garden’s programme for its latest revival of L’elisir d’amore. These creatures do have a way of stealing shows, but the canine who dashed across the flat Italian cornfield after Dr Dulcamara’s decrepit lorry... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Tenor Michael FabianoWednesday, 16 July 2014
You can usually trust the buzz around rehearsals. From Glyndebourne, five weeks into preparation for La traviata, which opens tomorrow, one of the team working on Tom Cairns’ new production declared in an e-mail conversation that newcomer soprano... Read more... |
Yende, Vaughan, Cadogan HallFriday, 16 May 2014
Lovely singer, consummate pianist, shame about the programme. “Art song” is a rather prissy term, but we could have done with a few to ballast a diet of old pop – French chansons, Italian canzonettas, Spanish canciones, Victor Herbert tralala. Even... Read more... |
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