Musical America Blogs

By ANDREW POWELL Published: December 27, 2013 MUNICH — Martin Kušej’s new staging of La forza del destino for Bavarian State Opera opened Dec. 22 and is due for streaming tomorrow. Well cast, it alas trivializes the feud and the questions of honor and destiny that excited Verdi and his librettist Piave, despite being the […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: November 22, 2013 MUNICH — Everything looked ready for its close-up, Mr. DeMille, at Die Frau ohne Schatten last night (Nov. 21). Down to the last falcon feather. When the cameras roll for a Dec. 1 live stream of this new Bavarian State Opera production, the copious blue-greens, red and purple […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: November 13, 2013 MUNICH — Olivier Py’s neon-lit vaudeville vision of Il trovatore is back, with cast adjustments. At the performance on Nov. 9, Krassimira Stoyanova introduced a cool-timbred Leonora of a certain age, her versatile and expressive top reflecting keen musicianship. Vitaliy Bilyy lurched about in hammy fits as di […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: November 12, 2013 MUNICH — Some like to tiptoe into a new job. Kirill Petrenko, 41, prefers to plunge. The fresh Generalmusikdirektor at Bavarian State Opera is now deep in rehearsals for his first production here: Strauss’s ambitious, arduous Die Frau ohne Schatten, uncut apparently. Krzysztof Warlikowski directs. Known in Munich […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: October 17, 2013 MUNICH — Spirograph needlemaniac defaces legendary (and conveniently deceased) Brünnhilde. And so on. Bavarian State Opera’s anticipated additions to its portrait gallery went public yesterday, their twenty-one victims — er, honored subjects — being depicted in various media by twenty-one visual artists. Scattered docent notes: • Anja Harteros […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: October 13, 2013 MUNICH — Next Wednesday (Oct. 16) new portraits go on display in Bavarian State Opera’s lobby. Twenty-one new portraits. Astrid Varnay, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Kurt Moll, Brigitte Fassbaender, Lucia Popp, Edita Gruberová, René Kollo, Hildegard Behrens and Waltraud Meier are among the worthy singing subjects, company troopers all. But […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: June 28, 2013 MUNICH — It helps when two of Caruso’s “four greatest singers” live nearby, the more so when they act as capably as they sing. That was the edge enjoyed by Bavarian State Opera in restaging Verdi’s Il trovatore to open its 138-year-old Munich Opera Festival yesterday, one of […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: June 8, 2013 MUNICH — The drama of Verdi’s Genovese opera Simon Boccanegra, circa 1339 and 1363, pivots on the protagonist’s Solomon-like statecraft and courage, as deployed in the Council Chamber scene of Act I. Here plebeo and patrizio powers, emotional and familial woes, jostle compellingly. In his new* staging for […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: May 4, 2013 MUNICH — Ádám Fischer keenly propelled a revival here last night (May 3) of Stephan Kimmig’s 3½-year-old, shipping-container staging of Don Giovanni for Bavarian State Opera. Predictably the music fared better than the dramma. Hanna-Elisabeth Müller brought an evenly produced, warmly intoned Zerlina. After a tenuous start coping […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: February 21, 2013 MUNICH — As dramaturgy, Calixto Bieito’s new staging here of Mussorgsky’s seven‑scene 1869 Boris Godunov (heard and seen yesterday, Feb. 20) runs into trouble almost immediately. Set in present‑day Russia — identifiable by the up‑to‑date, thug‑police gear and the wall map in Boris’s Terem (Scene V) — it […]