Schmopera
Featured
How to make the most of your summer program
On the ego
Mewsy goes to the Opera
Blog Roll
Canada sounds like: Mosaïque Project
"We dreamed of going on a nation-wide tour for our 10th anniversary, and realised that it was not going to be easy to pull off. So we came up with the idea of commissioning a piece that takes us across the country musically. One thing let to another, and we now have a nation-wide tour, and a great added visual dimension, including listeners from all across Canada."
Read MoreLayered comedy: Flight
What struck me most about this work by Jonathan Dove and April de Angelis is the intricate, layered nature of the music and text. I could see numerous performances of this opera and discover something new about it everything single time. Great comedy should make us think, and Flight provides plenty of food for thought.
Read MoreStrange inside: The Tender Land
The Maytag hosts clearly took the term "Iowa Nice" to heart. Free snacks and beverages were supplied prior to the performance, as well as pie and ice cream afterwards. The atmosphere was welcoming and friendly, and I could sense that the Newton community had enthusiastically embraced their first opportunity to host the opera.
Read MoreAntoine Wagner: Gesamtkunstwerk in 2018
He remembers an early-1990s summer at the Bayreuth Festival, during the creation of the now-famed Harry Kupfer production of the Ring Cycle, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. Antoine and Barenboim's son, David, had renamed all of their He-Man figurines after Wagnerian characters.
Read MoreLa Gazzetta: The Funny Papers
All the antics amount to nothing more than a big helium balloon and to keep the whole enterprise on the ground, director and designer Josh Shaw has approached it as if it were a musical-comedy. Every "song" is a "number" filled with coordinated movements and choreography.
Read MoreThe TSO's joyful ode to Oundjian
The symphony itself feels like an entire world, encompassing at once the life of one man - I always like it to be Beethoven's - and the lives of all people. It feels as though Beethoven offers up his story first, a conversation starter with humanity, letting us know of his hardships and his joys and his sense of humour, like an invitation for us to respond.
Read MoreThe Medium: opera as film noir
The film deserves broader exposure. Seven decades after Menotti composed the score and wrote the libretto, both still sound ever so inventive and contemporary. As a film director Menotti nurtured a naturalistic atmosphere in which it appears inevitable that his characters sing and in the process he has created a finely honed example of operatic film noir.
Read MoreA next-level Fledermaus in Des Moines
Although Frosch is a relatively minor character in the operetta, Brian Frutiger quite frankly stole the entire last act in my opinion. His physical comedy and drunken slur had the audience in stitches during his first scene, and I think he could have kept ad libbing for an hour without any complaints from the crowd.
Read MoreDon't miss: La gazzetta
"I look at an opera like Gazzetta as a special case for myself and for the POP audience. It's almost certain that no one in the audience will have every seen this opera, and the story is pretty easy to relate to - a father seeking fame and fortune puts his daughter out in public to gain attention for himself - so I feel comfortable keeping the concept pretty 'traditional'."
Read MoreMoving on up: Milan Milisavljević is MET's new Principal Viola
"Any section can have great harmony as well as tremendous strife. With a change of personnel and myself becoming Principal after twelve years of sitting Third Chair, I hope to usher an era of cooperation, artistic integrity and excellence that my section mates and I desired and can finally have."
Read More
