The Adagio of the Seventh — written in part as a tombeau for Wagner, scored for the first time in Bruckner‘s output with four Wagner tubas — is the longest…
SIMON BOCCANEGRA | MĂĽnchner Rundfunkorchester
There is a snobbery about concert performances of opera that the genre rarely deserves and almost never bears out. Strip away the costumes, the projections, the trapdoors and the directorial…
BRAHMS / ELGAR | Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia
There are pianists one admires, and then there are pianists who make admiration feel like an inadequate response. Igor Levit belongs to the second category — and the Brahms First…
MACBETH | Bayerische Staatsoper
Verdi was thirty-three years old. The great trilogy did not yet exist. Rigoletto, Trovatore, Traviata — none of it. And yet here he was, producing this: an opera about guilt…
IL TROVATORE | Opéra de Monte-Carlo
There is something quietly miraculous about Il Trovatore. Dismissed by snobs and adored by the masses, Verdi’s most melodically concentrated opera has always thrived on a certain paradox: the more…
DIALOGUES DES CARMÉLITES | Opéra de Marseille
A new production of Dialogues des CarmĂ©lites always raises the same fundamental question: how to reconcile the work’s metaphysical density with the radical simplicity it demands on stage. In Marseille,…
LES CONTES D’HOFFMANN | Staatsoper Unter den Linden
Few works demand such a precarious equilibrium between fantasy and coherence as Les contes d’Hoffmann. Too much caricature, and the piece collapses into vulgarity; too much restraint, and its surreal…
IL TROVATORE | Hamburgische Staatsoper
Il trovatore is, perhaps more than any other Verdi opera, a work of extremes: structurally fragmented, dramatically implausible at times, yet propelled by an almost unmatched musical urgency. It lives…
RIGOLETTO | Bayerische Staatsoper
New Rigoletto at the Bayerische Staatsoper. Should we go? And if so, why? For the story? Not really, as it belongs to that category of operas whose libretto reveals all…