The Classical Music Network (English) Sat, 20 Jun 2026 16:36:21 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/ http://www.concertonet.com/images/concertonet.jpg http://www.concertonet.com/
J. Dahdah, S. Beltrami (© Bettina Stöss)


Il Trovatore is one of Verdi’s most enduring operas. Melodically rich, it’s built on the foundation of four great roles: Manrico, the Troubadour, a tenor; Leonora, a soprano; the gypsy Azucena, a mezzo; and il Conte di Luna, a baritone. The arias, duets and trios written for these voices eclipse much of Verdi’s previous operatic output.


Dramatically, it’s intense but highly implausible. It’s easy to ridicule an opera whose plot originates with a nobleman burning a gypsy woman at the stake and her daughter Azucena then seeking revenge by attempting to bur]]>... Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17647
C. Ribas (© Monika Rittershaus)


Composed by the twenty-year-old Rossini, Tancredi (1813) was his first opera seria. It was also a clear shift from the late baroque operatic style that survived, despite Gluck’s reforms and Mozart’s innovations. It’s based on Voltaire’s Tancrède (1760), after an adaptation by Gaetano Rossi (1774‑1855) who wrote the libretti for several works by the likes of Niccolò Zingarelli, Simon Mayr, Giuseppe Farinelli and Nicola Vaccai. Rossi also wrote libretti for three Rossini operas: La cambiale di matrimonio (1810), Rossini’s second opera but first staged work; the]]>... Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17658
L. Davidsen (© Fredrik Arff)


In no city in the world are the movements of a star tracked more assiduously today than those of Lise Davidsen in New York. A reigning international soprano of unusual force and equally outstanding height, she is just off a successful run as Wagner’s Isolde at the Metropolitan Opera, where she will return in September to open the new season in her company role debut as Lady Macbeth in Verdi’s first Shakespearean opera. Her Carnegie Hall debut, an all‑Schubert program assiduously accompanied by the insightful pianist James Baillieu, was a late‑season must‑attend for musical New ]]>... Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17644
G. Capuçon, D. Gatti (© Oliver Killig)


A few days ago, I found myself inside one of the most magnificent concert halls on the planet. I had the good fortune to have been offered a guided tour of this majestic hall while empty, and was immediately mesmerized by its architecture, sense of grandeur and the attention to sonic detail invested in the building as a whole. However, this marvelous tour paled in comparison to being in its midst when filled to its 2,100‑seat capacity. It was humbling to be but one person in such a vast gathering, and life‑affirming to know that on this splendid June evening, so many people]]>... Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17636
M. Alsop, W. Marsalis (© Jeff Fusco)


Life may get complicated, like a big old wrinkled sheet, pulled in all directions, wadded up and tossed into a corner. But music is the iron that comes along, steams out the lumps, and smooths all the edges. Pretty soon, it holds place of pride in the linen closet, smelling of rosemary and promising sweet dreams.


That’s how I felt about this weekend’s Philadelphia Orchestra concert featuring the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Programs were printed, soloist selected, everything was set for the world premiere of Wynton Marsalis’s Symphony No. 5 with Marin Al]]>... Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17630
E. Kajtazi (© Elbenita Kajtazi)


Though a great opera, full of drama and alluring melodies, Verdi’s Luisa Miller hasn’t been produced frequently enough the past several decades. The reasons for its decreased popularity are manifold, beginning with its requirement of no less than six major voices – a decidedly expensive prospect for such a not so popular work.


Premiered in 1849, just before the dud Stiffelio (1850) and the hit Rigoletto (1851), it is considered the first opera of Verdi’s “middle period”. Its popularity was quickly eclipsed by Verdi’s ensuing three mega hits, Rigo]]>... Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17635 The entire plot of Mozart’s fabled opera Le nozze di Figaro (1786), based on Beaumarchais’s play La Folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro (1784), takes place in one day. The frenzied action in Lorenzo Da Ponte’s exceptionally well‑written libretto makes it one of the most dramatically compact and successful operas. A successful staging of the work will make one feel this quick pace of action.


Beaumarchais’s play, which preceded the French Revolution by a mere five years, was a forebearer of the turmoil and violence to come. It was a biting critique of class‑structured society, and took the side of underlings Figaro and Susanna, demonstrating that servants can outwit their masters. A director, even one]]>... Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17631
B. Talos, L. Aleksanyan, H. Vestmann (© Jochen Quast)


The phenomenon of "Opera in Concert” has become increasingly popular of late, for several reasons. One is that opera fans are more enamored with voices and music than with staging, especially with the dearth of directors with a grasp of history, literature and even music. The majority seem only interested in shock tactics. An operatic evening where one enjoys voices and music without absurd staging is a winning formula.


However, an unfortunate number of operas in concert feature overly familiar operas, even warhorses, as witnessed recently wit]]>... Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17623
B. Miranda, M. Guerzè (© Bettina Stoess)


In stark contrast to most settings, where Don Bartolo is wealthy and living in splendour, here Il barbiere di Siviglia is set in an ugly location, as seen by the hideous sets. In the libretto, Count Almaviva tells Figaro he noticed a lovely girl in the Spanish capital and is there to pursue her (“Al Prado vidi un fior di bellezza, una fanciulla figlia d’un certo medico barbogio”). To be invited to Court, Rosina would have to be from an affluent background, lower nobility or more likely grande bourgeoisie. But in the present modern production, there is no trace of Sevill]]>... Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17643
D. Erdélyi


Perhaps more than any other piece of classical music, Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana suffers from intense overfamiliarity. Clocking in at just over an hour and presenting 24 musical settings of medieval poetry in vernacular Latin across five sections, it is most famous for its driving “O Fortuna” introduction and finale reprise. “O Fortuna” is a meditation on the fickle nature of fate, which is immediately recognizable from countless popular culture borrowings.


Carmina Burana’s premiere in 1937 also placed it controversially within the torturous cultural politics of Nazi Germany, where t]]>... Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17653
A. Diehl, Y. Nézet‑Séguin, T. Sorey (© Allie Ippolito)


There is nothing like a Bruckner symphony played at full throttle by a dazzling orchestra and impassioned conductor. And that is exactly what audience members heard this weekend from Nézet‑Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Performing in Marian Anderson Hall in Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, the orchestra shared a program with a piano and orchestral tone poem by Newark‑born Tyshawn Sorey, an unexpected partnership in which each work complemented and seemed to comment on the other.


I admit to being a crazed Bruckner fanatic, so]]>... Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17611
(© Bettina Stöss)


“Rien n’empêche le bonheur comme le souvenir du bonheur” (“Nothing prevents happiness more than the memory of happiness”), surmises a woman to Karim, the protagonist of French novelist Gilbert Sinoué’s novel Les Nuits du Caire. Happiness versus the memory of happiness is the gist of Korngold’s most famous opera, written in 1920 Vienna by the 23‑year‑old prodigy.


How realistic is it to look forward when the recent past is too magnificent to forget? This was the predicament of the Viennese intellectual elite after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire followin]]>... Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17649
S. Alleaume, F. Manu (© Courtesy Opera Australia)


During renovation of the State Theatre, Opera Australia has relocated to the historic Regent Theatre to present their 70^th Anniversary Melbourne Season. Originally built in 1929 as a cinema in an ornately palatial style with Gothic lobby and massive Louis XVI style auditorium, it is listed as a treasured historic building. Closed and decaying for decades, it was revived in the 1990’s and reopened as a live theatre. This re‑purposing commendably saved from ruin an outmoded mammoth, but embeds several limitations including the lack of a fully submerged orchest]]>... Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17600
A. Kantorow (© Sasha Gusov)


If Beethoven pioneered the emotive spirit of the Romantic musician, his disciple Franz Liszt, who studied with one of the older man’s pupils and claimed to have once played for him as a child of eleven, popularized it, traversing Europe to give concerts for audiences that could add up to thousands of people. The star soloist tradition waned in the twentieth century, when performance was marked more by precision and introspection. But old traditions die hard, and this one has emerged anew in the twenty‑eight year old French pianist Alexandre Kantorow, who is touring with a challenging program]]>... Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17575
A. Núnez (© Gary Beechey [BDS Studios])


First staged in Berlin, Eine Nacht in Venedig (1883) is the only operetta by Johann Strauss Jr not to have premiered in Vienna, though its debut in the City of Music soon followed weeks later. Despite its alluring tunes, critics lambasted its nonsensical libretto. Nonetheless, somewhat bafflingly it remains one of Strauss’s most popular operettas. Some surmise the unusual choice of premiering the operetta in Berlin, the capital of the increasingly ascending Prussia (and as of 1871, Germany), is the reason for the work’s excessive levity. Afterall, Strauss was Viennese, and his ]]>... Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17592
J. Burton (© Eric Waters)


A missing baby swapped at birth; a gypsy burned at the stake; a lady‑in‑waiting faithful unto death; two men, actually brothers, fighting for her hand; a famous anvil chorus. It was parodied by Gilbert and Sullivan, also by the late comedienne Anna Russell, and famously, the Marx Brothers had a go at it, as well, in A Night at the Opera.


Any aficionado will know immediately that Verdi’s Il trovatore is the opera at hand, one saddled with a storyline that defies even basic operatic belief—a form known for an abundance of convoluted plots—but Verdi’s wo]]>... Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17574
R. Payare (© Antoine Saito)


This concert had the felicitous (but not uncommon) idea of juxtaposing Beethoven and Shostakovich. However, programming the Eight Symphony by Bonn’s native son with the modern Russian master’s “Leningrad” Symphony is a less frequent choice, and it’s a welcome one. Beethoven’s Eighth harkens back to some extent to his earlier symphonies. He lovingly referred to it as “my little Symphony in F” to distinguish it from his Sixth, a longer work in the same key. Where Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony is lighthearted and joyous, Shostakovich’s Seventh is one of the mo]]>... Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17590
M. Lindsay, D. Williams (© Bruce Zinger)


One hundred and twenty-five years after its 1902 première, Pelléas et Mélisande remains avant‑garde, at least dramatically. Debussy’s œuvre is familiar to many thanks to such seminal orchestral works as La Mer and piano works such as Suite bergamasque, neither of which are a challenge for the contemporary listener. However, the libretto for Pelléas, a variant of Dante’s Francesca da Rimini love triangle, is more aesthetic than realistic. Director Marshall Pynkoski notes the opera was created at the beginning of the twentieth century when Freud’]]>... Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17584
E. van den Heever, A. Kim (© Bernd Uhlig)


A successful first night for Frankfurt’s new production of Turandot, which went down well with the audience. Director Andrea Breth made the decison to play the opera in one long arc with no interval and to end it with Liù’s death in Act III, as did Toscanini conducting the world premiere in 1926, marking the fact that Puccini had not composed his final opera to completion. Frankfurt’s performance got off to an unconventional start with a new choral introduction composed by Lucia Ronchetti, and it proved a fascinating and wonderful experiment. Orchestral and electronic music s]]>... Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17564
J. Lehmann (© Sercan Sevindik)


Depuis le départ de François-Xavier Roth, l’orchestre Les Siècles vit une nouvelle vie sous la direction désormais régulière du jeune Berlinois Jakob Lehmann, souvent invité à la tête de l’ensemble. Place ce soir à mi‑parcours d’un Festival de Pâques d’Aix‑en‑Provence, à un programme associant Richard Wagner et Franz Liszt, qui permet d’entendre au cours de la même soirée les deux Concertos pour piano de Liszt, ce qui n’est pas si fréquent au concert. Au piano, le Toulousain Bertrand Chamayou, invité régulier de ce festival dirigé depuis maintenant treize ans par Renau]]>... Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17550
M. Jentzsch, M.-L. Värelä (© Barbara Aumüller)


Any director of Tristan has a major concern to deal with: how to stage a work of ideas and philosophies and very little action without it turning into a concert performance and possibly even grinding to a halt. Katharina Thoma’s 2019 production, well revived here by Orest Tichonov, uses few props and little scenery and focuses the attention on the characters, but I felt that it gave me nothing particularly new, just basic narrative action to relate the story and some relative abstraction to keep the mind focussed on Wagner’s underlying concepts. Maybe that is all one nee]]>... Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17563
(© Gabriel Fournier)


The entire plot of Mozart’s fabled opera Le nozze di Figaro (1786), based on Beaumarchais’s play La Folle Journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro (1784), takes place in one day. The frenzied action in Lorenzo Da Ponte’s exceptionally well‑written libretto makes it one of the most dramatically compact and successful operas ever written.


It features five major characters: Figaro; his soon‑to‑be wife Susanna; the Count and Countess Almaviva; and the adolescent page, Cherubino. It also features six secondary roles: the intriguers Bartolo, Basilio, Marcellina a]]>... Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17547
L. Oropesa (© Scott McIntyre)


A full moon shone over Palm Beach on March 2, as Palm Beach Opera’s growing roster of generous supporters gathered for a sumptuous evening of cocktails, dinner, dancing, and a recital by the noted soprano Lisette Oropesa, who appeared between engagements at New York’s struggling Metropolitan Opera. Past galas here have featured Plácido Domingo, Renée Fleming, and, last season, even the controversial Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, who despite mild protests and some disapproving media returned to performance in the North America for the first time since 2019, after which political issues around t]]>... Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17512
L. Lang, A. Nelsons (© Niu Er Art/Marco Borggreve)


“With maturity comes the wish to economize - to be more simple. Maturity is the period when one finds the just measure.”
Béla Bartók


“Destiny smiles upon me but without making me the least bit happier.”
Gustav Mahler


Carnegie Hall’s festival of orchestras is like Béla Bartók’s “Game of Twos” from his Concerto for Orchestra. So far, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic’s first evening paired t]]>... Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17494
K. Mäkelä (© Todd Rosenberg/CSO Principal Photographer)


“The climax of everything that is ugly, cacophonous, blatant and erratic, the most perverse music I have ever heard, is Ein Heldenleben’s “Battlefield”. The man who wrote this is either a lunatic or he is rapidly approaching idiocy.”
The Musical Courier, 1899


“I’m not a hero: I am not made for combat. Yet I am no less interesting than Napoleon himself.”
Richard Strauss


Successful conductors are appropriately, inevitably an egotistical lot. But when the young musical director-conduc]]>... Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17491