Puccini
La Vida Breve/Gianni Schicchi, Opera NorthThursday, 19 February 2015
The good news first: director Christopher Alden’s new production of Gianni Schicchi is quite brilliant, and one of the funniest, cleverest things you’ll see in an opera house. Puccini’s taut one-acter is difficult to mess up, but it takes some skill... Read more... |
Best of 2014: OperaSaturday, 27 December 2014
When everything works – conducting, singing, production, costumes, sets, lighting, choreography where relevant – then there’s nothing like the art of opera. But how often does that happen? In my experience, very seldom, but not this year. It's been... Read more... |
La Bohème, English National OperaThursday, 30 October 2014
ENO may not always have matched the Royal Opera in the Great Puccini Voices stakes. But it's served up many of the classiest Mimìs, with Valerie Masterson, Mary Plazas and Elizabeth Llewellyn as top seamstresses. Californian former beauty queen... Read more... |
The Girl of the Golden West, English National OperaFriday, 03 October 2014
So now it’s Minnie Get Your Gun from the director who brought us the gobsmackingly inventive Young Vic Annie (as in sharpshooter Oakley, not Little Orphan). Richard Jones’s subversive but still very human take on Irving Berlin discombobulated its... 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... |
Lorin Maazel (1930-2014) on Puccini's Golden GirlMonday, 14 July 2014
I met one of the 20th century’s most impressive, if not always sympathetic, conductors twice, on both occasions to talk Puccini before La Scala recordings of La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) and Manon Lescaut.Maazel was then still... Read more... |
Tosca, Longborough FestivalWednesday, 25 June 2014
For Longborough to open their new season with Tosca after last summer’s triumphant Wagner is to invoke Joseph Kerman’s famous diatribe against Puccini’s “shabby little shocker” in his fifties book Opera as Drama. Kerman used Wagner’s theories to... Read more... |
Manon Lescaut, Royal OperaWednesday, 18 June 2014
Puccini’s racy first masterpiece, like its successor La bohème, should feel like an opera of two halves – the first full of youthful exuberance, the second darker and ultimately tragic. The contrast here, alas, was between vivacious performers and a... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Soprano Kristine OpolaisTuesday, 17 June 2014
The best that you can usually expect from an interview is that it takes off from stock beginnings in spontaneous and unexpected directions. This one was rather exciting from the start: the end of a day in the life of a new role, Puccini's good-time... Read more... |
Kiri at 70Friday, 07 March 2014
Even more deserving of the sobriquet “the beautiful voice” than Renée Fleming, the natural successor who virtually copyrighted it, Kiri te Kanawa was one of the great sopranos of the 20th century. With those big, candid brown eyes and bone structure... Read more... |
Manon Lescaut, Welsh National OperaSunday, 09 February 2014
As before, WNO have a theme for their new opera season: this time it’s Fallen Women, a topic that might well attract the attention of the Equal Opportunities Commission. Surely men have the right to fall as well; we await, in June, The Fall of the... Read more... |
The Girl of the Golden West, Opera NorthWednesday, 22 January 2014
Puccini’s unlikely Spaghetti Western still convinces in Aletta Collins’ vivid new production. The incongruities in this uneven yet powerful work aren’t dodged but embraced. Most of them are musical: the sheer delight, for instance, of seeing stage... Read more... |
