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Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord‘s LE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME, now at the Lincoln Center Festival, matches high style with a ragamuffin disdain for it. Molière’s send-up of social snobbery under the reign of Louis XIV, in which the petit bourgeois M. Jourdain aspires to aristocratic status, veers from mannered satire to a savage buffoonery. All manner…
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Lulu
In William Kentridge’s production of Alban Berg’s LULU at the Metropolitan Opera, consciousness comes, hesitantly, into being, fragments, reconfigures itself, then shatters again, and is still, hours later, in uncertain consonance with the exterior world. It’s a completely realized work of Expressionist theater, the fin de siècle form that portrayed an individual perspective at odds…
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Tristan and Yseult
The story of Tristan and Isolde shares with Romeo and Juliet a special status among the archetypes of love, which for the Romantics was a thing so strong that it doomed its feelers, its sublimity fulfilled only through the greater sublimity of death. But I am convinced, having seen TRISTAN AND YSEULT, which revives the…
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Poe X 2
It was interesting, recently, to see two stage treatments of the works, and in one case the life, of Edgar Allan Poe. Interesting, that is, in the differences and similarities between them and in the fact of their synchronicity. Each was flawed, but memorable, both singly and, by fortuity, paired. Each set Poe’s poetry to…
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The Descent of Orpheus
St. Paul’s Chapel is a lovely place, the sort of structure that tempts the non-believer to belief and, no doubt, reconfirms adherents in theirs. That aesthetics can have such an effect is one of mysteries of being human, and it applies, of course, to music as well as architecture. It is, then, appropriate that the…
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Baden-Baden
The first of four pieces in BADEN-BADEN 1927, Gotham Chamber Opera‘s update and reassessment of the German spa-town festival held in that year, is Milhaud’s “Abduction (or Rape) of Europa.” It happens in front of a picture by the contemporary artist Georg Baselitz, who is known for exploring identical images in multiple works and from…
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New York Opera Alliance
The New York Opera Alliance, a consortium of 29 of the smaller operatic entities in New York, presented a wonderful showcase of the city’s talent on Sunday afternoon at (le) poisson rouge. A wide selection of work was sampled, mostly contemporary and in English, often giving voice to subjects or communities that tend to be…
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Giacomo Variations
Michael Sturminger’s GIACOMO VARIATIONS places the protagonist of the title – whom we know better as Casanova – at the end of his life looking back not only on his romantic conquests but on the resentments he has nursed at never having been fully accepted by the aristocratic classes he moved amongst. The text is…
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Moses in Egypt
With the parting of the red curtain last week at City Center, The New York City Opera returned home from its long exile to Lincoln Center and other venues. The music to Rossini’s MOSES IN EGYPT is lovely, and among the performers Sian Davies as Elcia and Wayne Tiggs as Pharoah made a particularly strong…
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María de Buenos Aires
That which is good about Beth Greenberg’s production of Ástor Piazzolla’s MARÍA DE BUENOS AIRES for Opera Hispánica is so very good that one doesn’t even want to think about that which is awkward or even bad about it. The supertitles are dreadful, no matter how difficult the surreal imagery of Horacio Ferrar’s libretto is…