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Iphigénie en Tauride: Birth of the Musical Tragedy

Cecilia Bartoli is reviving Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride for the Salzburg Whitsun Festival. As we eagerly await this new interpretation (which we know will be very erudite and documented) in a new production, we take a look back at the work itself, mid-way between opera and theatre, and its historical context, marked by the advent of Romanticism at the expense of opera seria. *** Iphigénie en Tauride, Gluck’s last Parisian triumph, is...

Published onthe 20 of May
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Portrait : Cecilia Bartoli Back in Salzburg

Cecilia Bartoli has had several careers.Since she set out to conquer the opera world twenty-five years ago, the Mozart and, especially, Rossini specialist has turned into an explorer of forgotten repertories with albums that became skilful marketing tools, accompanied by long tours with an unchanging programme:there was something highly displeasing in this carefully calculated spontaneity, with the same encores accompanied from one city to the next with the same gestures, the same...

Published onthe 19 of May
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Nina Stemme: Wagner Today

Suddenly, it’s obvious. She had been virtually unheard of, and now her name is suddenly on everyone’s lips. Yet she was one of the winners of the first Operalia competition in 1993; she debuted in Bayreuth in 1997, but she was merely singing Freia three years in a row, and Bayreuth then forgot her until two summers devoted to Isolde, in 2005 and 2006.Meanwhile, she’d had the time to make her debut in Salzburg (in Zemlinsky’s Der König Kandaules in 2002),...

Published onthe 29 of April
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Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci: Betting It All on Verismo

Perhaps not as well known as some more regularly staged operas, Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci (by Mascagni and Leoncavallo, respectively) are, nonetheless, major operas in the history of the genre (laying the foundations of verismo), with some of the most famous arias in opera and, in particular, having been interpreted by the greatest singers (Caruso foremost among them). And more recently, by Jonas Kaufmann, reprising the role of Turiddu at the Salzburg Easter Festival...

Published onthe 25 of March
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Joyce DiDonato : Master Class at Carnegie Hall

"Besides talent, what does it take to be a successful opera singer?" asked the aspiring artist right next to me to Joyce DiDonato on the last day of her masterclass at Carnegie Hall on this freezing cold 23rd of February. DiDonato answered: “Be curious. Ask your teachers: what was life in the 17th century? How did Handel understand women so well?”. Watching her master class is a fascinating way to understand what opera singers have to go through before bringing an...

Published onthe 06 of March
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Jonas Kaufmann renounces to Cavalleria Rusticana at La Scala

Each season or so in the biggest opera houses’ program, Jonas Kaufmann is nowadays one of the major performers of the lyrical scenes, able to fulfil entire auditoriums only based on his name, reaching a point that artistic directors wrest his commitments sometimes years in advance. This datebook can however turn out to be heavy, physically and vocally – the tenor highlighted recently on BBC that if “an agenda full for the coming five years proves to be financially...

Published onthe 05 of March