Opera
The cast for this Boston Lyric Opera production was first-rate, and composer Terence Blanchard has worked in a wide variety of jazz styles and shifts gears to keep the score swinging throughout.
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A new recording of Ferdinando Paër’s Leonora gives us characters we love (or love to hate) in a fresh light
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A major contribution to the recorded repertory, making clear just how effective Saint-Saëns’s The Yellow Princess could be on stage, its nowadays objectionable title repudiated by its varied and nuanced approach to the evocation of the exotic.
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I am beginning to suspect that Franz Schreker was the most effective of the many semi-forgotten opera composers who were active in the German lands during the first decades of the twentieth century (that is, ones less well known today than Strauss, Berg, and Kurt Weill).
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This first-rate performance highlights the special attractions of the “half-serious” operatic genre.
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Boston’s 15-year-old Guerilla Opera releases a recording of a fresh take on the old Grimm Brothers tale, to haunting, ritualistic music for four singers and four players.
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The composer of Cavalleria rusticana brought his sense for characterization and drama to the all-too-plausible tale of a woman victimized by a cad.
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Tenor Mathias Vidal shines, as does the period-instrument orchestra, in the rarely heard, trimmer version of 1761, on the Chateau’s own new award-winning label.
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Edward Loder’s well-crafted Raymond and Agnes (1855) captures much of the eerie glow of its Gothic model, Matthew Lewis’s once scandalous novel, The Monk.
Read MoreOpera Review: Arabs on the Operatic Stage — Meyerbeer’s 1814 Comic Opera about the Mysterious ‘East’
Long before the often-prejudicial portrayals of Middle Easterners in Hollywood films, opera composers crafted insightful works from 1001 Nights.
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