The men running these oil and gas corporations are as bad as street pimps. They are prepared to destroy the lives of others to enrich themselves.
Leave a CommentYear: 2010
Despite the rather old-fashioned and too elaborate first act, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a splendid concotion of music and movement and light.
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On account of his disdain for dance, Ioan Holender chose not to include any ballet among the premieres in a book of his time at Staatsoper. For opera fans only.
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In short, drunken idiots leading hideous lives. The pacing was interminably slow. High level of lighting and set design wasted.
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Social documentary and not entertainment or education. A demonstration of the limits of improvisation. Tightly scripted La Maman et La Putaine much better.
Leave a CommentStrangely, the Thomas Convenant series has never been made into a motion picture despite Hollywood’s bottom scraping LOTR lookalikes.
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Superb trumpet play, along with quiet mastery on the guitar. Your ears are there for Paolo Fresu but Ralph Towner makes it all possible.
I bought the Chiaroscuro CD while I was there. Surprisingly the CD is just a shadow of how Fresu and Towner play live together. This is one rare occasion where the live performance clearly outranks what the musicians can do in the studio. I guess you had to be there.
Porgy & Bess artistic director Christoph Huber was very animated after the show as well. It was one of the top five concerts I’ve ever attended there in five years.
Paolo Fresu on trumpet
Paolo Fresu on trumpet
Paolo Fresu on trumpet
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Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet fills a peculiar place between the historic pomp of Leonid Lavrovsky’s original and the very dancy minimalism of Grigorovich’s later classic. The brown and black costumes seem a little dusty and remind me of the seventies. But the seventies unbelievably enough are back in fashion so perhaps the retro brown look is already trendy again.
How does Staatsoper handle this middle of the road Romeo from 1962? With relative aplomb. The orchestra did seem a little undermanned or thin for Prokofiev’s magnificent score in comparison to performances I’ve heard in Moscow and St Petersburg.
On the dance front after two years of Harangozo’s whip hand, the corps de ballet handles their part without a false step. Standardising on the Russian norm has left a very svelte and elegant corps.
Rafaella Sant’Anna, Ketevan Papava and Liudmila Trayan are all fun as the Montague good time girls. Thomas Mayerhofer and Alexandra Kontrus were fine as the Capulet parents but not extraordinarily stately. Still when Alexandra Kontrus is carried away with her son Tybald one’s heart breaks for the bereaved mother.
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