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William Kentridge turns Salzburg’s new Wozzeck into a Gesamtkunstwerk
Salzburg doesn’t fear difficult opera. And Alban Berg’s Wozzeck certainly qualifies as one. Infrequently performed on more conventional stages because of the inaccessible music and distressing storyline, Salzburg embraced it wholeheartedly, both musically and visually.
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Salzburg: Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida by Shirin Neshat
The Salzburg music festival’s new director Markus Hinterhaeuser boldly outlined the motto of this year’s program as ‘power’: “strategies of power, its disgraces and horrors, but also with the ability to forgive.” With this bold declaration Hinterhaeuser possibly tried to
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Feather light and forgettable
Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Aix-en-Provence Festival 2017
There was little to commend the new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Aix-en-Provence Festival 2017. The stage set lacked any recognizable theme, and the intermittently raised and dropped metallic curtains offered no discernible purpose. Ditto on the costumes
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Paris, Texas & Pearls
Wim Wenders directs Bizet’s Pearl Fishers in Berlin
George Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers (Les Pȇcheurs de Perles) is a work of such notorious boredom that is it easy to understand the decision of the Berlin Staatsoper (still in its temporary home in the Schiller Theater) to spice it
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Jonas Kaufmann’s Otello at Royal Opera House
The hottest day in the United Kingdom in nearly 30 years. The day of the Queen’s Speech. And the hottest ticket in town was for opening night of the Royal Opera House’s new production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello, featuring German
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‘Composed’ a documentary film by John Beder
Performance Anxiety – for many musicians and performers it’s the fear which cannot, must not, speak its name, and together with injury and illness, it’s a major taboo. We don’t discuss anxiety because we’re not supposed to feel it. As
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Nearly a Meisterstueck: Kaspar Holten’s Meistersinger von Nuernberg
In his farewell production after a six year tenure as Director of Opera at Covent Garden, Kasper Holten managed a veritable hat trick. He turned Wagner’s notoriously overlong opera (at nearly five hours it is possibly the longest single opera)
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Lucia in Tel Aviv
Consider; opera based on text of XIX century with music of the same period produced and sang in Israel, a country reeling in inner battles; the ultra religious (haredim) against the institutions, the mitnahalim (settlers) against everybody, the right and
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