Under the baton of the excellent conductor Guillaume Tourniaire, Gluck’s most original tragedy comes to Venice’s most celebrated theater in a production by Pier Luigi Pizzi. After successive triumphs in the Viennese scene of the 1760s, over the course of the 1770s Gluck met with a new series of...
This is one of the most enjoyable opera produced. The playful production by Paul Curran (Teatro Lirico di Cagliari [Sardinia]) has a wealth of clever touches, and the sets and costumes are lovely, whimsical, imaginative, and wonderfully captured. T The libretto for "Cherubin" (1905), an homage to...
At death’s door, a beloved king is doomed unless someone takes his place. So then his wife resolves to sacrifice herself to save him. Christoph Willibald Gluck composed his reform opera Alceste not once, but twice. In La Fenice’s production of the lesser-known original Italian version,...
Rarely has a production of Verdi’s Otello been staged in such a prestigious location: the courtyard of the Palazzo Ducale in Venice! This special outdoor “event production” of the Teatro La Fenice takes place amidst genuine late-Gothic and Renaissance architecture highlighted by spectacular...
Maria Stuarda is a searingly dramatic setting of Friedrich Schiller’s play about Mary, Queen of Scots, and her political and personal rivalry with Queen Elizabeth I of England. While based relatively closely on historical characters and events, the opera’s central scene is fictional: the highly...
George Frideric Handel was one of those rare composers who excelled in both sacred, secular, instrumental and operatic music, leaving us extraordinary masterpieces in every field. Already renowned in Italy, Handel introduced himself to the city of London with his opera Rinaldo in 1711, which was...
