Month: April 2014

Review: Sondra Radvanovsky’s Astounding Virgin Queen in Donizetti’s “Roberto Devereux” – Canadian Opera Company, Toronto, April 25, 2014

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The Toronto performances of Donizetti’s “Roberto Devereux” were remarkable in so many ways that “historic” seems not too outlandish an adjective to apply. Soprano Sondra Radvanovsky’s Elisabetta, created in the context of British Director Stephen Lawless’ now familiar trio of productions of operas based on stressful events consuming the English House of Tudor, proved to … Read more

In Quest of Opera Company Performances of American Works – July 2014 to February 2015

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This feature highlights selected performances of operas at the 2014 Glimmerglass Festival, and in San Francisco and Los Angeles that I am scheduled to review. This list is supplementary to previous lists in this “Quests and Anticipations” series of selected operas being performed from July, 2014 through February, 2015: These are Bizet’s “Carmen” in Santa Fe [See Popular … Read more

Review: Ferruccio Furlanetto’s Masterful “Don Quixote” – San Diego Opera, April 5, 2014

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The San Diego Opera revived its 2009 production of Massenet’s “Don Quichotte” (translated into the Spanish and English as  “Don Quixote”, the more familiar name for Cervantes’ caricature of the elderly would-be knight-errant). Massenet’s opera, loosely based on episodes suggested by Cervantes’ epic, was presented again as a vehicle for Ferruccio Furlanetto, arguably the pre-eminent contemporary … Read more

DVD Review: Dramatically, Visually Exciting EuroArts DVD of San Francisco Opera Performance of Donizetti’s “Lucrezia Borgia”

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Last Fall, EuroArts issued the first in a series of six scheduled DVDs of performances by the San Francisco Opera at its home, the War Memorial Opera House. The performance is of Donizetti’s “Lucrezia Borgia”, starring Renée Fleming as Lucrezia, the Duchess of Ferrara. [Below: the cover of the brochure accompanying the “Lucrezia Borgia” DVDs.] … Read more