Tag: Opera
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By R.M. Campbell Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” is a fairy-tale set in an exotic land with good and evil clearly laid out and all sorts of magic generously sprinkled throughout the piece. It has held the stage steadily since its premiere in Vienna in 1791. The production closes the company’s current season. The first two…
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By Philippa Kiraly Mozart knew what he was about when he chose the Don Juan story for his opera “Don Giovanni.” The character lives, today as much as he has through the ages, the seductive rake without conscience or regard for the consequences of his actions. The opera is invariably popular. The current production, mounted…
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By R.M. Campbell A 101 years since its premiere in Monte Carlo, Massenet “Don Quichotte” finally made its way to the exotic Northwest where Seattle Opera opened a new production of this “heroic comedy” this weekend at McCaw Hall. Although the company has traversed a good share of the Massenet canon, plus a couple of…
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By Philippa Kiraly There can be only have been one really good reason for Seattle Opera Young Artists Program to perform Donizetti’s “Viva la Mamma!” or to give it its full Italian name “Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali.” That reason lies in the person of baritone Daniel Scofield, who undertakes the role of the aforementioned…
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By R.M. Campbell When Speight Jenkins, general director of Seattle Opera, was not in his usual seat just prior to the beginning of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” Saturday night at McCaw Hall, there were worries: the soprano had a sore throat, the tenor a bad back, the baritone, a sour stomach. But, as Jenkins quickly…
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Bruno Cinquegrani doesn’t consider himself a Donizetti expert, even when posed with a long list of experiences with the composer’s operas that suggest the contrary. “I’m not exactly an expert,” he remarked to me last week when I talked with him at the Seattle Opera’s rehearsal space in the South Lake Union neighborhood.
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By R.M. Campbell Wagner’s monumental “Tristan und Isolde” is not a stranger to Seattle Opera: it has never been approached lightly. The opera is too important, too central to the Wagner canon, too demanding to be treated with anything less than awe and respect. The last time the company mounted the opera, in 1998, it…
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By Philippa Kiraly It was Speight Jenkins, general director of Seattle Opera who persuaded bass-baritone Greer Grimsley that he should sing Wagner. That was for the 1994 production of “Lohengrin,” and Grimsley has sung in nearly every Wagner production here since. Talking with him as he prepares to sing Kurwenal in “Tristan and Isolde” which…
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By Jonathan Caves On the last night of the first complete Ring Cycle at Los Angeles Opera Symbolism took the lead: from the moment the curtain dissolved and the stage lights came up we were presented with an array of symbols from across the whole cycle. Loge: hanging over the stage foreshadowing the inferno to…
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By Jonathan Caves Siegfried is a problem child: the character can be one of the most annoying characters in all of opera and all too often this opera is the weak link in a Ring Cycle. This was definitely the case last night at The Chandler Pavilion. After the excellent production of Die Walküre (the…