Living at the Opera

In October, 2006, the Kirov Opera and Ballet will come to the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa CA. Billed as the “Mariinsky Festival,” the company will play for three weeks, starting with the Kirov’s production of Richard Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen.” The following observations were recorded about the Valery Gergiev and [...]

This article was written in celebration of the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg, Russia. In the foreword to John Ardoin’s book, Valery Gergiev and the Kirov, the late actor and writer Peter Ustinov remarks that for most of us in the West, the history of the Mariinsky Theater has been hidden from view. We have [...]

In today’s opera world, run over with esoteric opera directors pushing their entangled symbolic productions on to operatic stages, the musical and vocal values, the two most necessary components in presenting opera, often get lost in the shuffle. But not on November 12th and 13th, 2005, when two concert opera performances in New York City [...]

The following comments on Ainadamar were written after a visit to the Santa Fe Opera in the summer of 2005. There must be a running debate in musical circles, particularly with audiences and music critics, as to whether Osvaldo Golijov’s “Ainadamar” is a theatrical musical piece or an opera. The performance on August 14th, 2005 [...]

Giuseppe Verdi, October 9/10, 1813 – January 27, 1901 This performance of Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi and a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave was staged by O. Mukhortova at the St. Petersburg Mussorgsky State Academic Opera Theater on May 1st, 2001. I can still recall with vivid immediacy the visceral excitement I felt just moments [...]

Gaetano Donizetti, November 29, 1767 – April 8, 1848 This performance of L’Elisir d’amore by Gaetano Donizetti; libretto by Felice Romano was staged by Ludmila Noletova at the Moscow Theater named after Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Memirovich-Danchenko on May 28, 2001. To most of today’s opera critics in the Western world, performing an opera in [...]

In February 2002 the Kirov* brought two operas to Washington’s Kennedy Center: Musorgsky’s great opera Khovanshchina and Verdi’s Macbeth. The unexpected is always welcome in opera. The underlying qual ity desired in every performance is surprise coupled with elements of the unknown. Perhaps it comes in a particular scene, a singer’s charac terization, or in [...]

Often the Russians are able to delve deeper into an opera score and find a different slant to the composer’s intent which other companies do not always perceive. Thus it was when Artistic Director and Conductor Valery Gergiev, and Stage Director David McVicar, brought the Kirov Opera’s new production of Verdi’s Macbeth to the Kennedy [...]

This performance of Boris Godunov by Modest Musorgsky with the libretto by the composer based freely on a tragedy of the same name by Alexander Pushkin was staged by Yuri Alexandrov by the St Petersburg Opera at the Orpheum Theater, Phoenix, AZ, on November 3, 2001 On November 3rd 2001, the Saint-Petersburg Opera bussed into [...]

The following observations are on the video of La Forza del destino, KULTUR Copyright Reiner Moritz Associates Limited, 1998 When Francesco Maria Piave, Verdi’s librettist for La forza del destino traveled to St. Petersburg in 1862 with the composer, he kept a production book in which he commented on many aspects of the new production [...]