August 2022
Our front cover features Glyndebourne’s new production of La Bohème.
Inside, Stéphanie d’Oustrac talks to Rupert Christiansen about her dazzlingly wide range of repertoire, from Lully and Handel to Berlioz, Offenbach and Poulenc.
The composer Huang Ruo tells Ken Smith about his keenly anticipated new work, M. Butterfly, which has its premiere in Santa Fe at the end of July.
Michael Donley unravels the events that led to the discovery of a long-forgotten 18th-century comic opera by Samuel Arnold, The Siege of Curzola. Performances take place in the opera’s location, on the Croatian island of Korčula, in August.
Grimeborn has become a well-established and consistently enterprising summer festival, based at the Arcola Theatre in East London and extending to the Hackney Empire. Yehuda Shapiro looks at the way it has grown from its modest beginnings in 2007.
Michael Volpe is determined to change the way in which operas are produced. He explains his ambitions for his new company, If Opera.
Disc of the month is the French tenor Benjamin Bernheim’s Boulevard des Italiens, including excerpts from Spontini’s La Vestale, Cherubini’s Ali Baba, Donizetti’s La Favorite and Dom Sébastien, Verdi’s Jérusalem and Les Vêpres siciliennes and Mascagni’s Amica, with the chorus and orchestra of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna conducted by Frédéric Chaslin (Deutsche Grammophon).
The director André Heller-Lopes has chosen as a personal favourite the 1954 recording of Il turco in Italia, with Maria Callas, Nicolai Gedda, Nicola Rossi-Lemeni and Mariano Stabile, conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni.
Reviews this month include: Orfeo, Così fan tutte and Rusalka at Garsington Opera, La Bohème at Glyndebourne, Macbeth and Tamerlano at the Grange Festival, Siegfried at Longborough Festival Opera, Parsifal at Opera North, Orfeo ed Euridice in Tokyo, Das Rheingold in Zurich, Nabucco in Buenos Aires, I puritani in Rome, Hamlet in New York, Platée in Paris and Voss in Adelaide
August features summary
The French mezzo-soprano Stéphanie d’Oustrac in conversation with Rupert Christiansen
A view of the Grimeborn festival over the years by Yehuda Shapiro
Michael Volpe on a new way of producing opera and his new company, If Opera
The discovery and completion of an 18th-century comic opera, The Siege of Curzola, by Samuel Arnold, described by Michael Donley
The composer Huang Ruo talking to Ken Smith about his latest opera, M. Butterfly, premiered in Santa Fe at the end of July
André Heller-Lopes’s favourite recording: Il turco in Italia with Maria Callas
Order This Issue Subscribe
