operatoday

When Alma and Gustav Mahler arrived in New York just before the Christmas of 1907, they were installed in a lavishly appointed suite at the Hotel Majestic, with views overlooking Central Park. Alma’s reaction was: “We felt at home.” After ten years in charge of the Vienna Court Opera, her husband had been given a contract to conduct performances at the Metropolitan Opera for ...

Compositional stimulus comes in many forms, and for this concert given by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra under its principal guest conductor Anja Bihlmaier, impetus derived from an early form of industrial action to trigger Haydn’s Symphony No. 45 and ancient Chinese poetry prompted Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. This lyric symphony, we are told, was the inspiration...

In their different musical styles and forms, these two works offer a critique of the American Dream in its endless pursuit of material affluence, and how that impacts upon personal relationships and morality. Where the Bernstein is a sombre dissection of a marriage turned sour in the 1950s, Weill and Brecht’s ‘sung ballet’ is a sardonic take on how its protagonist, Anna, navi...

This was a semi-staged version of Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos; Laurent Pelly is the director at Glyndebourne, and, while I enjoyed his Donizetti La fille du régiment, seen at Covent Garden, this (at Glyndebourne) seemed less alive, less deep, less convincing. And Pelly is not the first to bring the Composer into the second act (so did the previous sta...

Set in 1970s Italy as exposited in the opening recorded monologue, Tonya and Ryan McKinny’s concept for this modern Tosca was a daring choice that, in short, paid off big time. The opera opened with a film of Cesare Angelotti, played by Cumhur Görgün, running down a hallway to escape the authorities. Görgün, an equally fantastic bass whether singing Puccini or Rossin...