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Alcina: the Last Pleasures of an Enchanted World

This year, a new production of Alcina, the « magical » opera written by Handel, is given for the opening of the Aix-en-Provence Festival, with Patricia Petibon singing the role-title alongside Philippe Jaroussky and Anna Prohaska. The occasion to (re)discover the enchanting work by the Germano-British composer, talking about freedom as well as bewitching seduction against true love, being maybe quite representative of its era. As the illusive world of the...

Published onthe 26 of June
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Alexander Pereira : " Great music for new generations "

LEADER’S VISION - GREAT MUSIC FOR NEW GENERATIONS Alexander Pereira wakes up every morning with 50 things he wants to accomplish that day. This bodes for a certain degree of frustration when they can’t all be achieved, but the general manager of La Scala is undeterred: ‘‘I always feel I have too much energy,’’ he says. Pereira was appointed to his current position in June 2014. He had previously served as artistic director of the Salzburg...

Published onthe 11 of June
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Iphigénie en Tauride: Birth of the Musical Tragedy

Cecilia Bartoli is reviving Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride for the Salzburg Whitsun Festival. As we eagerly await this new interpretation (which we know will be very erudite and documented) in a new production, we take a look back at the work itself, mid-way between opera and theatre, and its historical context, marked by the advent of Romanticism at the expense of opera seria. *** Iphigénie en Tauride, Gluck’s last Parisian triumph, is...

Published onthe 20 of May
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Portrait : Cecilia Bartoli Back in Salzburg

Cecilia Bartoli has had several careers.Since she set out to conquer the opera world twenty-five years ago, the Mozart and, especially, Rossini specialist has turned into an explorer of forgotten repertories with albums that became skilful marketing tools, accompanied by long tours with an unchanging programme:there was something highly displeasing in this carefully calculated spontaneity, with the same encores accompanied from one city to the next with the same gestures, the same...

Published onthe 19 of May
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Nina Stemme: Wagner Today

Suddenly, it’s obvious. She had been virtually unheard of, and now her name is suddenly on everyone’s lips. Yet she was one of the winners of the first Operalia competition in 1993; she debuted in Bayreuth in 1997, but she was merely singing Freia three years in a row, and Bayreuth then forgot her until two summers devoted to Isolde, in 2005 and 2006.Meanwhile, she’d had the time to make her debut in Salzburg (in Zemlinsky’s Der König Kandaules in 2002),...

Published onthe 29 of April