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 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 2, 2013 MUNICH — Can music be sincere and ironic at the same time? Ask Peter Dijkstra, the artistic leader of the BR Chor who last weekend (Oct. 26) led Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle as billed. Solemnly. The result sounded not much like Rossini. Nobody smiled, and the musicians looked […]

By James Conlon Today the world is marking the two-hundredth birthday of Giuseppe Verdi. It started already last night (he may have possibly been born in the evening of October 9). In either case, it really has been going on all year, and well it should. Verdi has been with me my entire life, since […]

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 Rebecca Schmid Richard Wagner has managed to slowly dominate the scene internationally in recent seasons, but with the official arrival of his bicentenary, the saturation in Germany has only begun. Nürnberg, Leipzig, Munich and Dresden have unveiled new exhibits; in the latter’s case, an entire new building. A stream of publications has hit the […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: January 8, 2013 RAVENNA — Sacred music has lent gravitas to Riccardo Muti’s career since the 1960s. Settings of the Ordinary and the burial service by Bach, Mozart, Cherubini, Schubert, Berlioz, Brahms and Verdi have drawn his attention and received, more often than not, a disciplined performance. No, this is not […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: December 21, 2012 MUNICH — They all laughed eight years ago when Bavarian State Opera set Verdi’s Rigoletto on the Planet of the Apes, and the production fast vanished. Naturally, then, the return of the deformed ducal jester in a new régie last Saturday (Dec. 15) promised relative normalcy, perhaps even […]