Luca Guadagnino stated that the reaction to Timothee Chalamet's comments was disproportionate, expressing confusion over how one comment could become a planetary polemic. He emphasized the importance of nurturing all forms of imagination and uniting the arts.
Giuseppe Verdi donated all royalties from his operas to the construction and administration of a luxurious retreat for retired musicians, designed by architect Camillo Boito.
Wagner's reputation can be both a headache and an irresistible challenge to opera directors. Though opera usually demands strict fidelity to the music as it was written, there is traditionally more leeway in staging decisions.
Fast forward a few decades and John Wilson is still hand-picking musicians and still serving up performances so polished they leave critics scrabbling for superlatives. These days Wilson's main outfit is the Sinfonia of London, and he is as likely to be conducting the symphonic mainstream as showtunes.
Rigoletto's librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, replaced the king with the Duke of Mantua, who is just as morally bankrupt as the original. The opera premiered in 1851 in Venice and has been a popular production to roll out with both name recognition and one of those golden tunes that almost everybody has heard: La donna e mobile, which becomes haunting in the context of the actual plot.
The opening night of the Metropolitan Opera's new Tristan und Isolde was one of those great nights at the opera, the kind that will have people arguing what shone most: the confident complexity of Yuval Sharon's staging, Lise Davidsen's indelible Isolde, her chemistry with tenor Michael Spyres, or the sensuous discipline of the orchestra. The answer, of course, is all of the above.
The piece is steeped in Schopenhauer's meditations on the futility of worldly striving and the necessity of accepting oblivion. It is also infused with Wagner's paganistic worship of desire and his matchless ability to translate longing into perpetually unresolved musical phrases.
At the Hamburger Bahnhof, the props, costumes, and set pieces of the musical are staged in vignettes throughout a large hall: a life-sized horse sculpture in a pink clearing surrounded by dirt, a curtained cart set up as a stage with a figure on its steps, two life-sized human figures in animal masks perched in a high window, as if observing the events.
When wonderful scores of music have been rediscovered after being forgotten for 350 years, it's akin to finding doubloons that were lost at the bottom of the ocean in a shipwreck. Yet the result of musical rediscovery is much better than finding long-lost gold, because musical treasures can be shared with a world of listeners.
In Siegfried, the third part of Der Ring des Nibelungen, Richard Wagner shifts the focus away from the troubled world of the gods towards the energy of youth on earth. This is storytelling through opera, where the theatre is crucial and the music sublime.
The Winter Oympics opening ceremony arrived shrouded in mystery. There wasn't a lot of advance publicity about what might happen, beyond a list of musical performers, heavier on popular classical names including Andrea Bocelli and Lang Lang than pop stars and a quote from the event's creative lead and executive producer, Marco Balich, that it would eschew hi-tech and bling.
"Piano piano" is an old Italian saying that sounds nonsensical, but is actually full of wisdom, especially if you, like me, are finding yourself wishing away these frigid winter days and hoping spring and summer gets here fast. These days, I've found myself rushing from one thing to the next, frustrated at the smallest things, from post office lines to just missing my train. And I'm ready to make a change.
David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly is a captivating drama that subverts Puccini's Madame Butterfly through the true story of a French diplomat's 20-year affair with a Chinese opera singer. As cultural and personal identities blur, the play challenges our assumptions about love, power, and deception. With its clever twists and poignant humor, M. Butterfly is a thought-provoking exploration of desire, illusion, and the complexities of human connection. Winner of the Tony Award for Best Play and a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Barbara Strozzi was a true 17th-century revolutionary. The adopted and quite possibly the natural daughter of poet and librettist Giulio Strozzi, she grew up in the bosom of the Venetian intelligentsia, taking part in debates from the age of 15. Her tally of 120 published works for solo voice was unequalled by any of her contemporaries. Despite remaining single, she managed to support four children on the income from her music alone.
She can belt it out in English and Italian; what can't she do? For the Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony in Milan, Italy, Mariah Carey did what those in Milan do: Sing in Italian. As she walked toward the center of the stage in San Siro, she was followed by at least five people who helped carry the train of her dress.
Upon its debut in 1725, The Four Sea­sons stunned lis­ten­ers by telling a sto­ry with­out the help of a human voice. Vival­di drew on four exist­ing son­nets (pos­si­bly of his own prove­nance), using strings to paint a nar­ra­tive filled with spring thun­der­storms, summer's swel­ter, autum­nal hunts and har­vests, and the icy winds of win­ter. The com­pos­er stud­ded his score with pre­cise­ly placed lines from the son­nets, to con­vey his expec­ta­tions that the musi­cians would use their instru­ments to son­i­cal­ly embody the expe­ri­ences being described.
Andre de Ridder is either brave or stupid. He has accepted the role as the music director of English National Opera its chief conductor and keeper of its musical flame. He will take up the role formally in 2027. The post has been empty for several anguished years, sparked by Arts Council England's 2022 announcement that the company would lose all its funding unless it moved out of London.
We began in the world that was-in the humid atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna, from which Zemlinsky, Schreker, and Schoenberg emerged. In a program note, Blier wrote that the "Fugitives" concept was inspired by Zemlinsky's "Meeraugen," or "Sea Eyes," which tells of a "person staring into the roiling abyss of the ocean." You had the feeling, as the evening went on, that the crushing realities of twentieth-century history-war, revolution, inflation, the Depression, Fascism-made such refined aestheticism untenable and forced composers onto other paths.
