July 2023
Our front cover this month celebrates the late, great Grace Bumbry (1937-2023) with tributes inside from Martina Arroyo and Yehuda Shapiro.
Features include:
- A profile of the director and librettist Ted Huffman before the premiere of his new opera with the composer Philip Venables opens in Manchester with performances in Aix to follow.
- Dominique Meyer, superintendent of La Scala, Milan, talks to Denise Wendel about his artistic plans for the future of the company as political storms rage about his head.
- Emile Zola included references to and descriptions of scenes from operas in many of his novels. John-Pierre Joyce reviews Zola’s unfavourable opinion of the works of Offenbach and his own librettos in collaboration with the composer Alfred Bruneau.
- Sakari Oramo choses a favourite recording—Falstaff, conducted by Herbert von Karajan in 1956, with Tito Gobbi, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Anna Moffo, Luigi Alva and Rolando Panerai.
Reviews include Aida and Wozzeck at Covent Garden, Don Giovanni at Glyndebourne, Weinberg’s The Idiot in Vienna, Die Walküre in Bern, Katya Kabanová in Lyon, Elektra and a Kurt Weill/Carl Orff double bill in Frankfurt, Pelléas et Mélisande in Los Angeles, Alcina and Hamlet in Paris, the premiere of Yonatan Cnaan’s Theodor in Tel Aviv, Macbeth in Toronto, I vespri siciliani at La Scala, Salome in Houston, Carmen in Skopje, Nixon in China at the Teatro Real in Madrid, Roméo et Juliette in Zurich, Don Giovanni at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
Our disc of the month is ‘a major discovery’: Jean-Baptiste Stuck’s opera Polydore, conducted by Györgi Vashegyi, on the Glossa label.
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