The Opera Tattler
Reviews of Performances and their Audiences
Category: Opera Review
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* Notes * My enthusiasm for opera is well-known enough for the people around me to have picked up on it. It was my good fortune to be given a staff guest ticket for the final dress rehearsal of Der Rosenkavalier last Wednesday. I have been to dress rehearsals before, but only in the Grand…
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* Notes * For the second performance of Don Giovanni, I thought I would check out the new OperaVision screens in the balcony. The two screens are retractable, and the images are not fixed, so that at first we were seeing the conductor and orchestra members and later we saw both close-ups of singers and…
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* Notes * Don Giovanni opened the summer half of the 2006-2007 season in San Francisco last Saturday. The co-production with Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie premiered in 2003, and has been also been performed at the Grand Théâtre de la ville de Luxembourg and Opéra de Lille. David McVicar's production was designed by John…
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* Notes * La Bohème is in the middle of a twelve performance run at Seattle Opera, with two casts. The production is from the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the whole thing looks just as one would expect. Pier Luigi Pizzi’s sets are perfectly traditional, as are Martin Pakledinaz’s costumes. The choreography was sometimes over…
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* Notes * Peter Mussbach’s production of Fidelio, which premiered at Bayerische Staatsoper in 1999, is infuriating and yet strangely dull. The set is boring, despite the many scene changes. It was also rather loud, the scrims made all sorts of sounds as they banged against the stage and a certain metal door squealed when…
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* Notes * Paper was the main motif in Peter Konwitschny’s production of Parsifal currently at Bayerische Staatsoper. The set was first hidden by a scrim covered with pieces of paper reading, in various languages, "Erlösung dem Erlöser," the last line of the opera. Act I featured a stage littered with white sheets of paper,…
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* Notes * A few weeks before I was to catch the last performance of Tannhäuser in Los Angeles, I received an alarming postcard from the opera warning that viewer discretion was advised as there was nudity, sexual content, and strong language in the production. The bacchanalia was explicit, though watching scrawny ballet dancers prance…
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* Notes * Händel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto opened for the first time in Seattle late last month. The production came from Florida Grand Opera and featured a great deal of dancing, choreographed by Donald Byrd. It was a bit loud and distracting at times. Paul Steinberg set had the effect of a pop-up book,…
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* Notes * Giancarlo del Monaco's current production of Simon Boccanegra at the Met is traditional, the set and costumes, by Michael Scott, are lavish and exceedingly beautiful. The one weakness was the scene changes, some took a long time and people would start chattering and momentum was lost. Even still, Fabio Luisi had a…
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* Notes * Pocket Opera's 30th season opened yesterday with Friedrich von Flotow's Martha. This company presents opera in English translation with a narrator, a small cast, and a refreshing unpretentiousness. Donald Pippin, the founder and artistic director of Pocket Opera, does all the translations, narrations, and plays piano accompaniment. For Martha, he lead the…
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