The Opera Tattler
Reviews of Performances and their Audiences
Category: Recital Review
-
* Notes * The San Francisco Opera training program Merola successfully held a virtual recital last Sunday using Vimeo. Featuring tenor Issachah Savage (pictured), a Merola alum from 2013, the beautiful singing was entirely in German. The recital was entitled "Anything for Love and Honor" and included arias and songs by Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf,…
-
* Notes * The Merola Opera Program of San Francisco Opera tried to hold a virtual recital back at the beginning of February using Vimeo. Featuring soprano Karen Slack (pictured, photograph by Scott Grieder) with pianist Mary Pinto, the weather in Philadelphia interrupted the performance several times and ultimately they had to rerecord the recital…
-
* Notes * Merola, San Francisco Opera's training program, held a third virtual recital yesterday afternoon via Zoom with pianist Ronny Michael Greenberg, soprano Maria Valdes, mezzo-soprano Alice Chung, tenor Casey Candebat, and bass-baritone Christian Pursell. It was a lovely 50 minutes of wide-ranging music from these musicians that live all over the country. Candebat…
-
* Notes * San Francisco Opera‘s training program Merola held another virtual recital yesterday afternoon via Zoom with vocal coaches and collaborative pianists Tamara Sanikidze (pictured left) and Edoardo Barsotti. It was lovely to see these artists usually behind the scenes highlighted. Sanikidze opened the performance with Three Intermezzi for piano, Op. 117 by Johannes…
-
* Notes *SF Opera Lab began with visual artist William Kentridge's production of Winterreise last weekend. His beautiful meditations on Schubert's Lieder are deeply immersive and the incredible performers, baritone Matthias Goerne and pianist Markus Hinterhäuser though very talented, seemed almost incidental to the work. The effect Kentridge gets with mostly black and white projections…
-
* Notes * The artistic director of New York Festival of Song, Steven Blier, presided over a Schwabacher Debut Recital entitled In the Memory Palace yesterday evening. The program included diverse selections from song cycles and vocal quartets with an underlying theme of courtship. Blier accompanied four Adler Fellows on piano. The structure of the evening…
-
* Notes * Pieter Wispelwey performed Bach’s Complete Suites for Unaccompanied Cello last Saturday at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, San Francisco. His playing is focused, rapid, and crisp. The phrasing and inflection of the notes was idiosyncratic, and one could never mistake Wispelwey’s playing with someone else’s. Though one would be hard pressed to call his…
-
* Notes *Bass-baritone Philippe Sly (pictured left, photograph by Adam Scotti) gave a recital with guitarist John Charles Britton for the Salons at the Rex series Wednesday evening. The evening's music consisted of fifteen Schubert Lieder, including ones from Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise. Instead of providing the text in the program, Sly read translations…
-
* Notes * Violinist Isabelle Faust (pictured left, photograph by Felix Broede) played Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas BWV 1001–1006 at Hotel Schweizerhof yesterday evening as part of Lucerne Festival zu Ostern. Faust’s playing is fluent, her technique secure. Her tempi tend to all be rather rapid, and her slower, quieter playing sounded anemic. The Presto of…
-
* Notes * Cal Performances presented baritone Eric Owens (pictured left, photograph by Dario Acosta) in recital with pianist Warren Jones on Sunday. The first half of the performance consisted of German Lieder and the second half French chansons. Owens and Jones started with Wolf's Drei Lieder nach Gedichten von Michelangelo, which were performed with…
The Opera Tattler 