Harry Fehr’s New Production of The Elixir of Love at the London Coliseum

The raw material for the show, Henry Purcell's opera Dido & Aeneas, was of the highest quality. The ensemble Les Arts Florissants led by its founder, William Christie, a world reference in the field of Baroque music performance, guaranteed a good instrumental and choral performance. The vocal soloists also seemed adequate. The intention was good: presenting Dido & Aeneas in a danced version seemed like a good idea, it has been done with this same title on other occasions...

David et Jonathasby Marc-Antoine Charpentier thrills at the Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci French Baroque at its best The French just know how to do it ... in this case, it is both an opera from 1688 and the production, including costumes and stage design. No wonder ... this is a co-production with the Opéra Royal/Château de Versailles Spectacles with the Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci and first shown in Versailles in November 2022. David et Jonathasis a...

Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore of 1853 is based on Antonio García Gutiérrez’s play El trovador. Set in fifteenth century Spain it tells of the noble lady Leonora who is in love with the troubadour Manrico, but is herself loved by the Count di Luna, a nobleman in the service of the Prince of Aragon. The Count’s younger brother Garzia supposedly died in infancy when a gypsy was burnt at the stake for allegedly bewitching him, and the charred body of a...

Lise Davidsen makes her role debut as “Tosca” at the Bergen International Festival Ever since Lise Davidsen hit upon the world of opera in 2015, when she won not one but three major competitions - Operalia, Hans Gabor Belvedere and in her home country, the Queen Sonja Competition – she has been a singer to watch. With her youthful dramatic full-bodied soprano, she has since enchanted audiences on the world's great stages in roles such as Sieglinde in...

The chorus sings its last phrase, the mysterious and enigmatic "Erlösung dem Erlöser" (Redemption to the redeemer) while greeting a Parsifal dressed more or less like a fascist dictator. Kundry, the Jewess, does not expire placidly after being baptized but, alarmed by what she sees and, above all, by what she foresees, she packs her bags and goes into exile, the curtain falls. The question is obvious: And now who will redeem us from Parsifal? Thus ends the Parsifal...

Berlin opera company delights with the world premiere of “Dalinda” a long-lost Donizetti opera Poison Murders Unwanted or Donizetti's Futile Struggle with the Neapolitan Censor This must be a musicologist’s dream: while digging around in musty books in the quiet atmosphere of the library of a music conservatory, to come upon scores by Gaetano Donizetti and realizing that this is not yet another version of “Lucrezia Borgia” (there had been but, in...