The Classical Music Network (English) Sat, 29 Aug 2026 21:32:23 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/ http://www.concertonet.com/images/concertonet.jpg http://www.concertonet.com/
A. Rubinstein, H. Chen
(© Painting by Ilya Repin/https://www.hanchenpiano.com)


“If you don’t walk away from a buffet feeling like you need a nap, you’re doing it wrong.”
Anon


At first glance, the program for “Reimagining Classics” resembled a menu of the most variegated buffet. Nine “dishes” in the space of 90 minutes. Composers either obscure or with obscure titles. Bits and pieces from longer works. Artists ranging from a young Taiwan‑born glittering pianist to a pair of iconic 20th Century artists. Music ranging from a virtuosic mid-19th Century sonata to a jazzy ver]]>... Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17798
(© Lena Laine)


Cinq jours après Berlin et trois après Salzbourg, l’Orchestre philharmonique de Berlin a donné le même concert à Lucerne, sous la baguette de son chef titulaire, Kirill Petrenko. Et comme à Berlin, la soirée s’est terminée par une ovation debout et sous les acclamations enthousiastes d’un public ravi d’avoir entendu cette fabuleuse phalange que sont les Berliner, tellement impressionnante techniquement. La prestation musicale de la formation et du chef ayant déjà été analysée en détail ici, on n’y reviendra pas. On mentionnera s]]>... Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17800
A. Windred, R. La Spina, H. Dix, S. Gallop, C. Hillier (© Robin Halls)


To mark the 100^th birthday of one of Melbourne Opera (MO)’s beloved founding patrons, Dame Joan Sutherland, the company dedicates this new production of one of her most lauded roles as Leonora in Il Trovatore. First performed in 1853, the opera is one of the three giants from Verdi’s middle‑period composed simultaneously with La Traviata and Rigoletto.


Despite the wealth of memorable music, the intensity of the dramatic situations and the nearly encyclopaedic catalogue of human ]]>... Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17794
S. de Peppo, H. Wilson, C. Creed, M. Hao, L. Botstein (back), A. Blake (© Giselle A.Cat)


“Too beautiful for our ears, my dear Mozart, and monstrous many notes.”
Emperor Joseph II after the first performance of Abduction from the Seraglio.
“Only as many notes as are needed.”
Mozart’s riposte

Decapitations, or deportations to Equatorial Guinea would befall any composers/librettists or directors who dared produce a musical comedy about our “Nine‑Eleven”. But from the time of Cervantes (who was indeed a prisoner) through Rossini and Bizet, comed]]>... Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17775
M. D’Elia, M. Mancini, G. Toia (© Ennevi Foto)


There was something particularly appropriate about the Rossini Opera Festival entrusting the opening of its 2026 Concerti di Belcanto to two young baritones who had already begun making their mark in Pesaro. Matteo Mancini and Giuseppe Toia appeared at the Teatro Rossini, accompanied by Michele D’Elia, in a recital devoted exclusively to Rossini. Both singers were also appearing in the festival’s revival of Jean‑Pierre Ponnelle’s L’occasione fa il ladro, Mancini as Don Parmenione and ]]>... Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17771
(© Ennevi Foto)


La scala di seta belongs to the group of one‑act farse with which the young composer established his reputation. Its plot—a clandestine marriage, an unsuspecting suitor, a meddlesome servant, an ineffectual guardian and a succession of concealments and misunderstandings—is hardly substantial. Yet Rossini’s musical imagination transforms this flimsy material into a remarkably sophisticated theatrical mechanism.


The work inevitably recalls Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto, not least in its domestic setting, marital complications and gallery of comic types. But if Cima]]>... Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17769
(© Ennevi Foto)


Rossini’s L’occasione fa il ladro, first performed in Venice in 1812, may be one of the composer’s lesser‑known operas, but the performance at the Rossini Opera Festival showed just how much fun this little comedy could provide. Full of mistaken identities, exchanged suitcases and romantic confusion, it was a light‑hearted work that relied on quick pacing, lively ensemble scenes and singers who could act as well as sing. In Pesaro, all these elements came together to highly entertaining effect.


The story was deliberately simple. After a storm, two travellers accident]]>... Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17767
V. Berzhanskaya (© Amati Bacciardi)


It was an excellent idea to present Le Siège de Corinthe at this year’s Festival, as it marked the bicentenary of the opera’s Parisian première. Rossini’s first French opera also offered Pesaro an opportunity to revisit one of the most intriguing episodes in the composer’s theatrical afterlife: the transformation of Maometto II, his great Neapolitan tragedy of 1820, into the grand opéra Le Siège de Corinthe, first performed in Paris in 1826. The latter was far more than a French translation of its predecessor. Rossini substantially remodelled the score, redistri]]>... Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17764
(© Ennevi Foto)


Puccini’s Turandot proved once again to be an opera particularly suited to the immense setting of the Arena di Verona. In Franco Zeffirelli’s spectacular production, the performance combined powerful singing, impressive orchestral playing and the visual grandeur that the Arena can offer. The historic character and enormous scale of the ancient amphitheatre seemed especially appropriate for an opera built around a legendary story from a distant and almost imaginary world.


Zeffirelli’s production is undoubtedly a major achievement, particularly when considered in relation to the en]]>... Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17760
(© Bayreuther Festspiele/Enrico Nawrath)


By the time Götterdämmerung brought Bayreuth’s anniversary Ring to its cataclysmic conclusion, the experiment in artificial intelligence had ceased to resemble an experiment and begun to look rather more like a punishment. Eleven hours of visual improvisation had taught the machine remarkably little about Wagner, dramaturgy or the elementary principle that an image on stage ought to have some reason for being there. The problem was not AI itself, but that Bayreuth had given it a Wagnerian vocabulary without teaching it the grammar.


The premise had]]>... Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17753
R. Alagna (© )


The Arena di Verona presented a curious study in operatic contrasts this summer, offering two Aidas that could hardly have embodied more divergent conceptions of the work: Stefano Poda’s and Franco Zeffirelli’s. After encountering Poda’s Nabucco the previous evening, I found Zeffirelli’s venerable production, first seen by me in 2018, almost reassuring in its unapologetic theatricality. It was hardly a subtle affair. Verdi’s ancient Egypt had been ]]>... Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17762
(© Bayreuther Festspiele/Enrico Nawrath)


By the third evening of Bayreuth’s AI-assisted Ring, one could no longer pretend that bewilderment was merely the inevitable companion of experimentation. What had initially been announced as an exploration of the dialogue between artificial intelligence and Wagnerian theatre increasingly resembled the visual equivalent of an internet search gone spectacularly astray. The evening unfolded beneath an incessant torrent of projections—historical photographs, fragments of previous Ring productions, political iconography, abstract textures and algorithmic hallucinations—that]]>... Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17747
N. Brownlee, E. Teige (© Bayreuther Festspiele/Enrico Nawrath)


The Bayreuth Festival’s revival of Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Der fliegende Holländer remained one of the most divisive Wagner productions of recent years: a staging that replaced the composer’s metaphysical drama with an elaborate psychoanalytic revenge narrative, while simultaneously achieving moments of undeniable theatrical power. Whether one regarded it as an act of penetrating reinterpretation or an unnecessary act of dramaturgical vandalism depended largely on one’s tolerance for directors rewriting libretti rather than illuminating them.

]]>... Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17741
(© Bayreuther Festspiele/Enrico Nawrath)


Among the four evenings of Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen, Die Walküre has always occupied a unique position. If Das Rheingold erected the philosophical edifice of the tetralogy, Die Walküre endowed it with flesh, blood and tragic humanity. Nowhere did Wagner more perfectly unite metaphysical speculation with overwhelming emotional immediacy. It was therefore particularly dispiriting to witness this inexhaustibly rich drama once again subordinated to Bayreuth’s misguided AI experiment.


Marcus Lobbes, grandly styling himself an “AI cura]]>... Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17740
(© Bayreuther Festspiele/Enrico Nawrath)


The 150th anniversary of the first Bayreuth Festival was always destined to invite retrospection. Rather than commemorating the occasion with an entirely new scenic Ring, however, festival director Katharina Wagner opted for a far more experimental proposition: a semi‑staged cycle in which artificial intelligence generates projections in real time, responding to Wagner’s score, the sung text and even the performers’ movements. The undertaking was born as much of financial expediency as of a desire to explore new theatrical frontiers. Wagner himself was never averse to te]]>... Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17739
G. Scherer, J. Holloway, A. Schager
(© Bayreuther Festspiele/Enrico Nawrath)


Richard Wagner’s Rienzi, der Letzte der Tribunen is a five‑act grand opera composed between 1838 and 1840 and premiered in Dresden in 1842. It is based on Edward Bulwer‑Lytton’s 1835 historical novel Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes, itself inspired by the life of the fourteenth-century Roman revolutionary Cola di Rienzo.


At the time Wagner wrote Rienzi, he was deeply influenced by French grand opéra, particularly the works of Giacomo Meyerbeer, Fromental Halévy and Daniel Au]]>... Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17737
M. Kurmanbayev, D. Haller, M. Viotti
(© Patrick Pfeiffer für Rossini in Wildbad)


Rossini’s Semiramide (1823) has long been recognised as the summit of his Italian opera seria. His final work for the Italian stage before embarking upon his Parisian career, it distilled the composer’s mature bel canto style while simultaneously looking backwards. Its monumental architecture, heroic protagonists and lavish vocal ornamentation consciously evoked the grandeur of eighteenth-century opera seria. Richard Osborne aptly dubbed it “Tancredi revisited”: both operas drew upon Voltaire and were fashioned ]]>... Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17730
C. Muschio, P. Kabongo (© Patrick Pfeiffer für Rossini in Wildbad)


Among Gioachino Rossini’s so-called semiserie operas, La gazza ladra (1817) occupies a singular position. Premiered at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala only months after La Cenerentola, it combined comic and serious elements on an unprecedented scale, uniting domestic drama, social injustice and moments of genuine pathos with Rossini’s inexhaustible melodic invention. Adapted from the French melodrama La Pie voleuse by Théodore Badouin d’Aubigny and Louis-Charles Caigniez, the opera explores the fragility of justice in a rigidly hierarch]]>... Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17724
H. Clark with cast (© Maria Baranova)


“My music is melodious, beautiful, and unfortunately presents no problems to ears developed beyond the 19th century.”
Richard Strauss before the 1928 premiere of Helen in Egypt


“Oh, how I wish I could rub my beauty out like a picture, and assume hereafter in its stead a form less comely. This is the doom and depth of my despair: the very beauty that makes other women happy has proved for me a blasting curse.”
Euripides, Helen


The weirdness of Leon Botstein’s latest production, Richard Strauss’ ]]>... Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17731
I. Monteverdi (© Patrick Pfeiffer für Rossini in Wildbad)


Premiered at Venice’s Teatro San Moisè on 24 November 1812, L’occasione fa il ladro occupied a singular position among the five one‑act farse that Rossini composed for that theatre. During the composer’s lifetime, it proved the most successful of the series, before disappearing almost entirely from the repertory after his death. Its neglect has always seemed undeserved. Composed, according to tradition, in the astonishing span of only eleven days after contractual disputes had delayed Rossini’s arrival in Venice, the score already revealed the astonishing]]>... Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17728
(© Anja Köher/Bregenzer Festspiele)


Leos Janácek was no model of academic docility. The son of a Moravian schoolteacher, he was a gifted but notoriously difficult student whose musical independence was accompanied by a formidable capacity for making enemies. He was briefly expelled from the Brno Organ School after writing a withering critique of his teacher’s conducting; years later, his savage review of an opera by Karel Kovarovic earned him the composer’s enduring enmity. When Kovarovic became director of Prague’s National Theatre, he was hardly inclined to forget the insult, and Jenùfa was initially denied the Prag]]>... Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17754


Founded in 1989 under the artistic direction of Jochen Schönleber, the Rossini in Wildbad Festival took as its point of departure the composer’s celebrated sojourn in the spa town in 1856, when Rossini sought relief from his ailments in the healing waters of the Black Forest. Rather than exploiting this historical coincidence as a mere marketing device, Schönleber transformed it into one of Europe’s most adventurous bel canto festivals, devoted not only to Rossini but also to forgotten contemporaries, critical editions and the cultivation of young artists. This season once again demonstrated that spirit of discovery by juxtaposing familiar mas]]>... Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17726
(© Daniel Ammann/Bregenzer Festspiele)


There are opera productions that one watches, and there are those that one experiences. La traviata at the Bregenz Festival belonged emphatically to the latter category. On the immense floating stage of Lake Constance, Verdi’s intimate tragedy was refracted through a visual language of extraordinary scale: shattered mirrors, water, projections, mechanical transformations and a world of Roaring Twenties glamour. The result was an evening in which opera became simultaneously theatre, spectacle and visual metaphor.


The Bregenz Festival has long cultivated th]]>... Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17755
M. Torriglia, E. Fosset, D. Voronov, J. Amirault
(© Patrick Pfeiffer für Rossini in Wildbad)


Le festival Rossini in Wildbad réserve chaque année quelques découvertes  : des voix promises à un bel avenir mais aussi des œuvres rarement montées de Rossini ou de compositeurs méconnus, comme ce Mariage en poste de Jean‑Baptiste Weckerlin (1821‑1910), un natif de Guebwiller, donc presque un voisin, Bad  Wildbad étant proche de l’Alsace. Voilà une figure oubliée de la musique française. Ce musicien a exercé la fonction de bibliothécaire tout en se consacrant à la musicologie et à la musique folklorique]]>... Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17738
D. Voronov, J. Amirault, E. Fosset
(© Patrick Pfeiffer für Rossini in Wildbad)


Having attended many of Europe’s leading opera festivals over the years, I finally discovered one that had long eluded me: the Rossini in Wildbad Belcanto Opera Festival. I confess that I had approached it with a measure of scepticism. Another Rossini festival inevitably invited comparison with Pesaro’s illustrious Rossini Opera Festival, whose artistic standards remain formidable. Yet Bad Wildbad quickly dispelled such reservations. Nestled amidst the idyllic landscape of the northern Black Forest, the elegant nineteenth-century spa town pr]]>... Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17727