Bayreuth: Parterre Box reports that next summers’ broadcast (and subsequent DVD) will be Parsifal. If it ends up actually happening, this will be fantastic. It’s a genius production and one that is uniquely inaccessible (my review of it on this blog is here). Also at Parterre, be sure to read Dawn Fatale’s brilliant reviews of Lohengrin and Tannhäuser at Bayreuth.
Vienna: The Staatsoper is going again. Could anyone stop
it? The place is truly a force greater than Franz Welser-Möst’s beat,
than the shine from Dominique Meyer’s Glatze, than an
elderly standee trying to get to the front to see Netrebko. It can be equaled only by a certain aging baritenor. They opened with Placido as the Doge, natch. So it’s still going.
New York: Opera Omnia, one of the small non-Met New York opera groups that is inevitably described as “plucky,” is currently producing Cavalli’s Giasone at Le Poisson Rouge. Remaining performances are this Tuesday and Wednesday; please report here if you’ve seen it. Giasone is a wonderful opera, one of the masterpieces of seventeenth-century Venice, but I’m not going to be there because a) in English b) amplified and c) I just moved to a newly Manhattan-adjacent location and can’t see the floor of my new place yet. (Correction: contrary to the report I heard, apparently it is NOT amplified.)
New York: We would like to take this moment to remind you that Les Arts Florissants will be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music later this month with Lully’s Atys. Don’t you dare miss it. Do you remember how they did The Fairy Queen a year and a half ago and how it was the best?
New York: One to possibly mark on your calendar. In November, the Opera Orchestra of New York will be Adriana Lecouvreur-ing with Angela Gheorghiu and Jonas Kaufmann (well, we can hope so, considering his recent health issues). I saw them do this in London already, and it’s hard to muster up the enthusiasm for another Adriana (I also saw Guleghina and the baritenor at the Met). But who am I kidding, I’ll probably end up there anyway.
Non-Americans FYI, the holiday is “Labor Day” on Monday, our totally socialist-/communist-free alternative to May Day.