Tag Archives: mozart

Against the Grain Theatre’s season announcement

Posted on by
Reply

The following just in from arguably Toronto’s most exciting opera company; Against the Grain Theatre.  So a party, György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments and Leoš Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared (with the brilliant Jacquie Woodley) and Figaro’s Wedding; a Toronto centred reworking of the Mozart classic with an orchestra for the first time.  Following on from successes like their Tranzac based La Bohème and a brillian The Turn of the Screw, this looks very exciting.

Full details, links for tickets etc, below the fold.

Continue reading →

Chill out dude

Posted on by
5

The problem with reviewing Doris Dörrie’s 2002 Berlin production of Così fan tutte is that pretty much everything that can be said about it already has been.  It’s like trying to write about Willy Decker’s “red dress” Traviata.  So I’ll try and be brief and to the point.  On the surface the idea is a bit outlandish.  Mozart and da Ponte’s satire about sexual fidelity is updated to the 1970s though to me, who grew up in the 70s, it seems much more like the 60s.  That said, it works.  It’s lively, funny, musically top notch and the presentation on DVD is very decent.

Continue reading →

Almost ideal Idomeneo

Posted on by
5

The 2006 Salzburg production of Idomeneo seems to me to be just about ideal.  The production is clean and consistently interesting without ever getting too far away from the core story and the pretty much unbeatable cast is backed up by the period sensibilities of Roger Norrington and the Salzburg Camerata and Bachchor.  The only fly in the ointment is the utterly heinous video direction.

Continue reading →

Time is a funny thing

Posted on by
9

A series of blog posts discussing time, perceptions of time and historically informed performance (HIP) plus seeing Opera Atelier’s Der Freischütz got me thinking along some curiously convergent lines and arriving at the conclusion that HIP isn’t and can’t be what it is often purported to be; a fairly faithful attempt to reproduce a work as it would have been seen by its first viewers or “as the composer intended” or something like that.  Not, of course, that even if it was, we would see and hear it as the original audience did but that perhaps is a topic for another day.

Continue reading →

Chav Giovanni

Posted on by
5

Calixto Bieito’s 2002 production of Don Giovanni from Barcelona’s Liceu theatre is a drink and drug fuelled nightmare. The general atmosphere will be familiar enough to anybody who has been around the “entertainment district” of a large city around chucking out time. Besides chemical stimulants and a great deal of enthusiastic bonking there’s also lots of violence, some of it quite disturbing, and buckets of blood but, as far as I could tell, only one rape.  It’s bold and never dull but I think it stretches the libretto to its very limits and perhaps beyond.

Continue reading →

La Clemenza di Tito – Paris 2005

Posted on by
8

The Opéra national de Paris 2005 production of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito is very fine.  Ironically it’s actually quite a conventional production overall though one scene, the one where Tito makes his first appearance, is so weird that it provides the generic name used in some circles I frequent for an entirely inexplicable production element (see below).

Continue reading →

Pulp Figaro

Posted on by
Reply

Today’s Ponelle production is the 1976 Le Nozze di Figaro.  It has the starriest cast of any of the Ponelle films I’ve seen to date; Herrman Prey in the title role, Mirella Freni as Susanna, Kiri Te Kanawa as the countess and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as the count.  It even, rather bizarrely, has Maria Ewing as Cherubino.  To round things out Karl Böhm conducts with the Wiener Philharmoniker and Staatsopernchor.  As we shall see, musically it lives up to the casting.   Continue reading →

Artificial and cruel Così

Posted on by
3

In 1988 Jean-Pierre Ponnelle made the last of his lip synched opera films; Mozart’s Così fan tutte.  It carries Ponnelle’s trademark “artificiality” even further than in other of his films that I have seen.  The sets, the costumes, the acting and the camera work never let us forget that this is a work of the, in the director’s words, “greatest artificiality”.  It also becomes increasingly clear as the piece progresses that Ponnelle has a very clear idea of what “the opera is about”.  Continue reading →

Patchy Zauberflöte from Ludwigsburg

Posted on by
3

The Gramophone Guide describes the 1992 Ludwigsburg Festival production of Die Zauberflöte as a “life-enhancing experience” so I thought I’d take a look.  I think the folks at The Gramphone Guide are rather over-egging it but it is a pretty decent production.  It’s very much geared to Ludwigsburg’s small stage and limited scenery handling capacity but it makes good use of the space and clever lighting, including a willingness to black out the stage, and some deft stage craft make up for the limitations. Continue reading →

It’s a mystery

Posted on by
Reply

Given all the myriad versions of Le Nozze di Figaro in the DVD catalogue (eighteen currently available) why would anyone bother with a bog standard version in 18th century dress and with a cast that probably aren’t household names in their own households?  Who (apart from the Toronto Public Library) would buy such a thing?  Anyway, that’s pretty much what you get on the 1994 Lyon recording.  To be fair, there’s nothing wrong with it.  If you saw it live in Winnipeg or Edmonton you probably would feel that you had had an OK night at the opera but why a DVD release?  It’s a mystery!