Acting
This epic opera follows Virgil, beginning as the Greeks appear to have ceded the field after ten years of the Trojan War. Cassandra tries to warn of the terrible fate to come, but fate is set and Troy falls. The first two acts cover this tragic end, then the flight of survivors to Carthage and events at Carthage continue in acts 3 - 5, culminating in the further voyage for Italy and Rome. This is Virgil's classic epic, in operatic form, in about a three and a half hour performance from French Opera.
Inspired by a fable by La Fontaine, [composer Jean-Philippe] Rameau produced perhaps his most brilliant music for his penultimate great work, blending reality and the surreal on several levels.
Meet Mignon , a shy and ingenuous young girl ignorant of her past, who will see her quest for identity upset by a terrible love triangle.
When a free-spirited woman is arrested, an impressionable soldier is charmed into letting her go. But having risked everything to be with her and lost, his hopes of happiness soon turn into a jealous rage. With equal parts danger and desire, Carmen is an intoxicating cocktail that never fails to excite the senses. French mezzo-soprano Stéphanie d'Oustrac plays the seductive heroine with a rock ‘n’ roll attitude who bears more than a passing resemblance to Amy Winehouse. Spanish director Àlex Ollé’s production is conducted by Kazushi Ono at the New National Theatre Tokyo.
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Berlioz’s whimsical and nostalgic take on Shakespeare’s great comedy Much Ado About Nothing graces the stage of Glyndebourne in Laurent Pelly’s astute 2016 production. Italian maestro Antonello Manacorda leads the London Philharmonic in Berlioz’s brilliant score.
This is a joy from beginning to end. Although there are many tricks and ideas from Laurent Pelly, as always he seems to still retain the Offenbach magic. La Lott and Monsieur Beuron are a joy, but so is everyone else. The Patriotic Trio by the sea is both a hoot and wonderfully sung, the score seems truly complete yet never flags and the finale sequences for especially acts 1 & 2 are a joy of movement and sound fused as one glorious Offenbachian moment.
In the sumptuous Art Deco setting of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the Orchestre national de France performs one of the masterpieces of French Romanticism with a stellar vocal cast: Stéphanie d'Oustrac, John Irvin, Paul Gay, and Frédéric Caton.
A ruthless dictator falls in love with a sexy woman. Together, they get rid of every obstacle in their way: his wife, her former lover, and also the voice of reason. Everything is sacrificed to passion, in this tale where evil triumphs, virtue and reason are humiliated, and nothing corresponds to our moral principles. Jan Lauwers, the director and choreographer, sets L'incoronazione di Poppea in a way congenial to his means: a visual artist, he translated the emotions expressed by Monteverdi’s music into dancing and visual images. The result was mixed; the general impression was one of many ideas, seemingly not fully developed or analysed. The stage was constantly cluttered with moving bodies, or tableau vivants, leaving a sense of confusion, and distracting from the music.
Micaela Villegas was Lima's leading theatrical lady in the 1770's when Peru was a Spanish colony. Her life was fictionalized in a one-act play by Prosper Merimee and a libretto was fashioned on which Offenbach created his opera bouffe La Perichole, reflecting the creative mania in Paris at the time for Spanish life and art. La Perichole and Piquillo, her lover and companion in misfortune, are impoverished street singers. Meanwhile the Viceroy Don Andres de Ribeira wishes to make her his lover. In music of vivacious rhythms including boleros, seguidillas and rich arias, Offenbach plays out their love against a broader social canvas.
The oratorio concerns the Christian martyr Theodora and her Christian-converted Roman lover, Didymus.
Boldly rewriting the opera’s dialogue to accommodate his concept, Mr. Tcherniakov presents “Carmen” as a large-scale role-play, a novel bit of psychotherapy for a numb modern man.
This adaptation of three tales by E.T.A. Hoffmann, with a sprinkling of Goethe’s Faust, portrays the German poet as both narrator and hero recounting his love affairs with Olympia, Antonia and Giuletta. Robert Carsen’s spectacular production highlights the melancholy genius of a man marked by life, with a coherence and dramatic sense remarkable for a work that leaves numerous questions unanswered. Under the baton of Philippe Jordan, Stéphanie d’Oustrac, Ermonela Jaho, Kate Aldrich, Yann Beuron and Ramón Vargas and Stefano Secco in the main role, interpret the legendary airs of this work whose brilliant mystery will continue to dazzle opera houses for countless years to come.
A return to its roots for Castor et Pollux, Jean-Philippe Rameau’s lyric tragedy first performed in 1737 at the Académie royale and inspired by the mythological episode of the Gemini. Rarely performed in its original version – the score was reworked by Rameau himself in 1754 –, this daring work plays on contrasts and expressiveness, as in the famous “Tristes apprêts”. The aria is sung by Télaïre mourning the death of her fiancé Castor, killed in battle, before his twin brother Pollux descends into the Underworld to ask his father, Jupiter, to bring him back to life. While this opera celebrates brotherly love, its prologue poses an essential question for director Peter Sellars: how do you stop a war and its attendant hatred and resentment?
Featurette from the Opus Arte DVD of Les Paladins by Jean-Philippe Rameau staged at the Théâtre du Chatelet in Paris, 2004.
