The Opera Tattler
Reviews of Performances and their Audiences
Category: Karita Mattila
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I am going to skip out on tomorrow's Live in HD Met Simulcast of Manon Lescaut, as there is quite enough of Puccini in my future. It is tempting, as the cast looks good. I heard Mattila sing the title role several times in 2006, and that production was one of the best that season.…
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* Notes * The last opera of the year at San Francisco Opera will be Manon Lescaut this Sunday. Overall, this production was the best of the seven, because the cast is strong and the set design is neither distracting nor nonsensical. It is interesting to note that Carmen sold out for the last three…
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* Notes * Lyric Opera of Chicago's production of Manon Lescaut opened with a matinee performance yesterday. The production, designed by Frank Philipp Schlössmann, was completely traditional, rather unlike the 2004 Der Fliegende Holländer, which was the last Lyric production to come here. This production, taken as a whole, has been my favorite thus far…
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* Notes * Despite having a subscription to San Francisco Opera for 3 seasons, I only managed to attend my first Opera Insight Panel Discussion yesterday. The hour-long panel discussion on Puccini's third opera was moderated by music director Donald Runnicles and included soprano Karita Mattila, bass Eric Halfvarson, baritone John Hancock, and the stage…
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So in the last week of December, I finally watched a television program in its entirety for the first time in seven years. It was a broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera's production of Fidelio. I suspect that part of the reason I do not watch television is because I have no idea what is on…
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San Francisco Opera’s current production of Leoš Janáček’s Káťa Kabanová starts off with words projected on the scrim, from Alexander Ostrovsky’s The Storm, on which the libretto of Káťa is based. This is during the overture, which could not be more than 5 minutes long. I found the staging to be quite ugly, something about…
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