At Santa Fe Opera, not “Oscar”-worthy 2
Ascending the hallowed hilltop upon which Santa Fe Opera roosts is a treasured journey — even for the initiated. The massive parking lot is sprinkled with “tailgaters,” their fold-out picnic tables draped in linen, wine bottles atilt in ice buckets. It’s the first visual hint of a wonderful evening in store. Outdoor “lobbies” that encircle ...
The opera Pusherman
Jun
22
2012
Curtis Mayfield was a genius and “Pusherman” perhaps his greatest composition. Someone should develop it into an opera.
“Patty The Revival” at Highways. Smart and wonderful. Go! 1
Unlike the 28-year-old theater wunderkind Patrick Kennelly, whose electro-opera “Patty the Revival” I very much enjoyed at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica last night, I was a vulnerable ten-year-old sponge when “The Patty Duke Show” hit the airwaves circa 1964. Ka-thunk. That’s the sound of television pablum landing on my undefended prepubescent brain. And ...
Donizetti doubled up at the Met
Mar
31
2012
From our Maine correspondent, the Colby College history professor Paul Josephson, who sends breaking opera news on this grey Saturday afternoon in Los Angeles — While listening to Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore,” on “Live at the Met” [broadcast] today, and after “Una furtive lagrima,” to wild applause some one screamed out, “Encore!” and Juan Diego Florez ...
Pytor Ilyich Tchai-copy-cat 1
A fun musical post contributed to arts·meme by Erica Miner . . . Sound familiar? That’s Tamara Milashkina and Eugeny Raikov, singing Undina and Huldbrand’s duet from Undina by Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky wrote this early opera in 1869, and though it was not one of his two ‘hit’ operas — Eugene Onegin in 1879 and The Queen of ...
Fear & loathing at the Met: Rene Pape as Boris Gudonov 1
Read this story on The Huffington Post. Opera goers didn’t so much descend the Metropolitan Opera House’s red staircase late Friday night as fled the house after a challenging four-hour encounter with “Boris Gudonov,” Modest Mussorgsky’s sprawling recitative-driven opera from 1869. Valery Gergiev, the Mariinsky Theater conductor whose advocacy for “Boris” may have spurred the ...