Kiandra Howarth wins $10,000 Culturarte Prize at Operalia 2015
Aussie soprano, aged 25, scores at Plácido Domingo’s Covent Garden competition for budding opera talent.
Aussie soprano, aged 25, scores at Plácido Domingo’s Covent Garden competition for budding opera talent.
An almost great production with one unfortunately conspicuous weak link.
The annual APRA AMCOS Awards celebrating “diversity and vibrancy” sees increase to first time nominees this year.
As part of our July feature, Victorian Opera's Artistic Director chooses his top recordings.
With opera companies more and more regularly dazzled by the lights of Broadway, we investigate the seemingly irresistible rise of musical theatre.
Joyce El-Khoury on being thrown to Donizetti’s lions. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in
Baroque specialist, harpsichordist and pioneering conductor of Handel opera passes at 80.
★★★★★ Donizetti was one of the most prolific opera composers of all time, an appealingly personable fellow (if you read the letters), and an extraordinary professional capable of turning out a work in just a few weeks. That very facility though has led to a general dismissal of his music as too easy, rushed, derivative, or worse. Les Martyrs disproves all of these. A late work (1840), this grandest of his French grand operas was written simultaneously with the slighter, yet inexplicably more popular La Fille du Régiment, but the two works couldn’t be more different – one a trivially sucrose French confection, the other a profound meditation on faith and duty. But while Daughter of the Regiment went on to conquer the world, Les Martyrs sank without a trace. That latter statement isn’t entirely true. Les Martyrs was itself an expanded reworking of Poliuto, an opera Donizetti had written for Naples that fell foul of the censors and so never made it to the stage. Poliuto has been championed intermittently over the years (there’s a superb live version with Callas, Corelli and Bastianini) and Glyndebourne have just given its British premiere, but Les Martyrs is a horse of a…
Trio of great performances help four hours of passion and politics fly by.
The 66-year-old Italian bass talks to Limelight about Kings, Christoff, Karajan and the secret of vocal longevity. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in
The mighty Canadian tenor who redefined Peter Grimes passes at 88.
Limelight’s Editor meets the American Turandot all set to be the next Aussie Brünnhilde. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in
Finally, one of Britain’s finest ensembles tackles the final masterpiece of one of Britain’s finest composers. The results are, as you’d expect, spectacular. Henry Purcell left the semi-opera The Indian Queen unfinished at his death in 1695 and it fell to his brother Daniel to supply a happy ending of sorts in the form of The Masque of Hymen for the 1696 revival. Consequently, audiences would have heard less music at the work’s Theatre Royal premiere in 1695 than they would have in any of Purcell’s previous semi-operas such as The Fairy Queen, from which the present work borrows a dance (more recycling sees the inclusion of the overture from the ode Come Ye Sons of Art). But what the music might lack in quantity, it more than makes up for in quality. Purcell devoted every ounce of his skill and artistry to bring to life John Dryden and Sir Robert Howard’s convoluted play about the Mexican Queen Zempoalla’s war with the Montezuma-led Peruvians, and the airs, dances, duets, trios and choruses perfectly manifest those “Italian and French styles English’d” so typical of this English Orpheus. The recording opens with an amusing pre-show entertainment, Purcell’s satirical three-voice catch To all…