Tabla de contenidos para Winter 2025 en Opera Now

The Fondazione Teatro La Fenice has announced that Maestra Beatrice Venezi will become its next music director. The appointment, approved unanimously by the Foundation’s president, Venice Mayor Luigi Brugnaro, and the board, will begin in October 2026 and run through 2030. Brugnaro and the board expressed ‘great satisfaction’ at the decision, calling Venezi’s leadership ‘a significant added value for the Theatre’s activity in terms of professionalism, international visibility, energy, and renewal.’ At 34, Venezi is one of Italy’s most high-profile young conductors, known for her advocacy of overlooked repertoire and a strong media presence. Her appointment, however, comes amid mounting tensions at La Fenice. Musicians from the theatre’s orchestra have voiced concerns over both her suitability and the decision-making process. In an open letter, they criticised the lack of consultation…

I am waving across the café of New York’s Chelsea Hotel to Cleopatra. The day before our meeting, Julia Bullock had held the packed Met auditorium spellbound, singing the role written for her by John Adams – a part so huge that it risks becoming a 21st-century parallel, perhaps, to Wagner’s Isolde. Over a well-earned cuppa, Bullock, 39, is open and vivid, quick to laughter and full of energy. Her rise to fame has been breathtaking, as is her versatility. Her first solo recording, Walking in the Dark, won a Grammy, and her varied activities have carried her from a tribute to Josephine Baker in her project Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine, to her slavery-inspired programme involving a new work by the composer Jessie Montgomery, History’s Persistent Voice. This autumn…

When Philadelphia’s Curtis School opened its doors just over 100 years ago in 1924, the opera world was recently mourning the death of Enrico Caruso. Margaret Matzenauer was giving her all on the Met’s stage and Turandot was left unfinished by a dying Puccini. The school’s founder Mary Louise Curtis Bok had a bold vision for the music landscape at the time: to create a conservatory where the most promising young musicians could develop their talents without financial barriers. She was the daughter of Philadelphians Louisa Knapp and Cyrus H K Curtis, a magazine and newspaper magnate, and was the sole beneficiary of the estate when her father died in 1933. Now, the school comprises 160 students with 25 vocal and opera students. Its small size is something that everyone…

UK OPERA FRINGE By Robert Thicknesse I occasionally ask myself why I am I trudging around the not hugely glamorous venues of the opera fringe instead of swanning about at Glyndebourne all summer – but something always turns up to make it all worthwhile. This time the magic descended in Frome, of all places, one of the stops on Somerset Opera’s tour of a re-engineered Giulio Cesare, and it was absolutely the most adorable and enjoyable thing I’ve seen all year. Last year we covered the company’s reboot, with the memorable Dido in Taunton, but this was a different creature entirely. Helena Payne, who sang Cesare and created the show with the terrific young director Edwina Strobl, chopped Handel’s monster down to two hours, chucked in some choruses from Messiah…

Grisélidis Massenet Bru Zane BZ 1058 If you like mainstream Massenet – perhaps Manon or Werther – Grisélidis is an interesting option for exploration. It is top drawer stuff, despite its bonkers story of the devil trying to tempt the heroine as she stoically awaits her husband who’s enjoying that medieval all-inclusive package holiday, a crusade somewhere hot with the lads. She’s also fending off a mopey suitor, like a sort of Penelope without the dodgy handcraft. The score is fabulous – Massenet’s eroticism is at its most voluptuous with duets worthy of Esclarmonde. There are woodwind curlicues reminiscent of Thaïs, doom-laden chords from Werther, witty dialogue from Le jongleur de Notre-Dame, and Mephistophelian echoes of Gounod’s Faust. But don’t think it’s an operatic salmagundi; it sits firmly within the…

1 Pavarotti was born in a) Modena b) Mantova or c) Monza? 2 What job did his father Fernando do? 3 What did Pavarotti hunt for backstage for good luck before a performance? 4 Who directed the 2019 documentary film, Pavarotti? 5 Having shared a wet-nurse, who joked that Pavarotti obviously got all the milk? 6 Pavarotti dedicated ‘Donna non vidi mai’ to whom at 1991’s Pavarotti in the Park concert in London? She and 150,000 other fans got drenched as he sang! 7 As a member of the male-voice Corale Rossini, at what competition did he win first prize? 8 What was Pavarotti’s first professional stage role: and where and when? 9 Why did Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge choose Pavarotti for the Sutherland Williamson tour of Australia, 1965?…

As part of the worldwide celebrations marking what would have been Luciano Pavarotti’s 90th birthday, Mercury Studios is set to release Pavarotti: The Lost Concert, a new 60-minute documentary built around a rare rediscovery in the tenor’s career. The film centres on Pavarotti’s emotional 1995 return to Llangollen, the Welsh town where, as a 19-year-old in 1955, he won his first major international competition singing in his father’s choir. Four decades later, at the peak of his fame, he returned, giving a concert that has remained unseen for nearly 30 years. Restored footage of that performance, interwoven with archival material and new interviews, forms the heart of the documentary. The film will receive its international premiere this autumn, with a Blu-Ray release of the full concert to follow later in…

How did the company begin? St Paul’s Opera started life in St Paul’s Church in Clapham, south London, 14 years ago as an ‘accident’, describes founder and director Patricia Ninian. ‘It began as a fundraiser for the church, I’ve actually forgotten what we were raising money for! We had a vicar at the time who was a great opera fan. She supported that first event and we’ve kept going ever since.’ The company has continued with a production every year since, except 2020, and in 2022 became an independent charity. ‘We’re no longer part of the church,’ Ninian explains, ‘but we still exist there. All our productions and concerts happen there.’ What productions does the company put on? The company’s schedule is one full production each summer which forms its…

April Koyejo-Audiger came into the world singing. ‘Up until the age of five, apparently, I sang Whitney Houston every day. I Will Always Love You came out the year I was born.’ But it wasn’t until she was 14 that Koyejo-Audiger knew she had a voice. She came across auditions to join the community chorus for a production of Koanga, Delius’s rarely heard opera about an African prince. It was being staged at Sadler’s Wells Theatre by a small opera company called Pegasus, which had been founded in Brixton in 1992 – as it so happens, the same year Whitney Houston’s single was released. Auditioning for the company’s founder, the late tenor Lloyd Newton, and the countertenor Michael Harper – who sadly died this year – was a revelation for…

It’s on everything from T-shirts, beer and socks to surfboards. It even has its own emoji, and Debussy used it on his score of La Mer. But while the image of people in tiny boats overwhelmed by mountainous seas might be familiar, the story behind the creator is not. That is about to change with Scottish Opera’s world premiere on 12 February of The Great Wave: an extravagant story about artist Katsushika Hokusai and his famous woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa. The co-production with Kajimoto, which commissioned the opera with support from the Japanese government, will be directed by Satoshi Miyagi and highlights the continued cultural exchange between Japan and Scotland. Hokusai was a major influence on Charles Rennie Mackintosh at the turn of the 20th century and…

During the summer, tourists flock in their thousands to picture-postcard Salzburg. They trek up to Hohensalzburg, the fortress that overlooks the city, the Hellbrunn Palace and its trick fountains, the Mirabell Palace and, of course, Mozart’s birthplace. Cultural tourists flock there for the Salzburg Festival, five weeks of top-notch opera, music and theatre. This year’s operatic line-up was typically challenging – both in terms of repertoire and the directors selected. Donizetti on a treadmill Ulrich Rasche’s staging of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda was particularly challenging… for the singers. The stage of the Großes Festspielhaus stage was dominated by two enormous clock-like discs which manoeuvred and tilted, orbiting each other slowly. These clockfaces themselves rotated, a treadmill the singers constantly negotiated in slow, robotic steps. On paper, much of this read pretentiously.…

Production Highlights • World Premieres • Exceptional Casts UNITED KINGDOM GLYNDEBOUNE GLYNDEBOURNE FESTIVAL OPERA La bohème | Puccini OCT 17, 19, 22, 25, 28, 31 MOV 02, Stage director Floris Visser Conductor Adam Hickox Set designer Dieuweke va Reij Lighting designer Alex Brok CAST Rodolfo Andrèa Agudelo Mimì Aida Pascu Marcelllo Aksel Daveyan Colline Makus Suihkonen A Midsummer Night’s Dream | Britten OCT 18, 21, 23, 26, 29 Stage director Peter Hall Conductor Bertie Baigent Designer John Bury Lighting designer Paul Pyant CAST Puck Saxon Fox/Joshua Fowler Oberon NIls Wanderer Titania Jennifer France Lysander Robert Lewis LONDON ROYAL OPERA Die Zauberflöte | Mozart OCT 17, 20, 23, 25, 28, 30 NOV 01,03 Conductor Marie Jacquot Director David McVicar Set & costume Designer John Mcfarlane CAST Pamina Lucy Crowe Tamino Amitai…

After four editions, the latest of them in June, the Bucharest Opera Festival has carved out a distinctive niche for itself on the European opera circuit. Last year’s anniversary Puccini edition presented a feast – of the composer’s eight mature operas, in full stagings, by different companies, within the space of ten days – unrivalled anywhere else. Many opera-lovers are still surprised to learn that Romania supports 10 opera companies. No less surprising, and admirable, is the consistently high standard of singing across them. This standard is nurtured by a focus on the Italian repertoire which belongs to the country’s ‘Roman’ history and cultural heritage. For example, the most modestly scaled and funded opera company in Romania is probably the one based in the Danubian port of Galaţi. Yet, on…

You used to be able to rely on the opera world to agree on things. Now the fissiparous lines that cut at unexpected angles through societies and families are dividing the operatic community too. Recent weeks have seen management engaged in physical combat with an artist on stage at the Royal Opera in London while that same stage has hosted Anna Netrebko, a singer the Metropolitan Opera in New York has banned, given her previous show of support for Vladimir Putin. The Met will, however, enter into a lucrative new partnership with Saudi Arabia, an authoritarian Gulf state with a record of severe human rights violations including the execution of its own citizens, having extrajudicially assassinated the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 and on 14 June this year executed Turki…

All roads lead back to Llangollen. In July 1955 a 19-year-old Luciano Pavarotti crossed Italy’s border for the first time to sing with his father and Corale Rossini at the International Musical Eisteddfod. They defeated 22 choirs, and the young tenor, tasting the joy of victory shared with his father, quietly promised himself he would return. Forty years later he did, not as a chorister but as the world’s most recognisable operatic voice, greeting a packed Pavilion and calling that first Welsh visit ‘the beginning of everything’. The conventional rungs were there – Rodolfo in Reggio Emilia (1961), La Scala (1965), Covent Garden and Vienna soon after – but they could not contain what followed. On 17 February 1972, at the Metropolitan Opera, Pavarotti’s nine top Cs in La fille…

Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s first opera together, Dead Man Walking, premiered at San Francisco Opera on October 7, 2000. Based on Sister Helen Prejean’s 1993 memoir about how she became a death penalty activist, it became the most-performed new opera of the 21st century, with more than 80 productions to date. The opera opens with a violent crime and closes with the execution of Joseph De Rocher, one of the criminals. And there’s Sister Helen herself, a plain-spoken Roman Catholic nun whose strength of character and beliefs led her to become a spiritual advisor to death row inmates and an activist opponent of the death penalty. Susan Graham, the mezzo-soprano who created Sister Helen, tells Opera Now: ‘It was such a privilege to create this part, to honour and…

Dido and Aeneas Purcell Erato 2284884 Maxim Emelyanychev conducts a vibrant reading of Purcell’s opera, full of drama, and played superbly. It is all very polished and if there is one drawback it is sometimes a bit too much of a good thing, aurally bottom-heavy as the bass lines thunder away. And theatrical excitement can veer a little to camp in the studio; the witches are fun, the sound effects vivid, but a couple of times it perhaps crosses the line. Joyce DiDonato is a superb Dido, full of hauteur hiding sensitivity, her voice awash with colours. She is not afraid to let rip, not least in her final confrontation with Aeneas, Michael Spyres. Her diction is impeccable, his not quite so clear, though his vocal heft is attractive. Fatma…