Here, I post my reviews and document my love of opera. I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to comment on any of my posts or contact me if you wish to.
Have a nice stay!
David Buchler
All tagged Bruno Poet
Calixto Bieito, the Director of this production, first seen in 2012, brings his own personal interpretation of an unyielding Carmen in the midst of early 1970’s Franco-type testosterone-filled masculinity. No quarter is given. The male soldiers are at the same time playful boys and violent nasty male caricatures. The misogynistic treatment of women stands out in this stripped back production, but the gratuitous violence that simmers throughout the evening is at times unedifying and disturbing.
Verdi’s penultimate opera is probably his greatest tragic musical masterpiece and the opening night of Keith Warner’s 2017 production did not disappoint. Warner’s production followed in the footsteps of Elijah Moshinsky’s glorious 30 year old production. The sets designed by Boris Kudlicka are made up of sliding and moveable fragments that either open the stage, such as in the outstanding opening storm scene, or close the stage when intimacy is required.
Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, written in 1983, is an opera in three Acts based on the life and religious convictions of the Egyptian Pharaoh, Akhnaten. The opera was commissioned and premiered in Stuttgart Germany and the American premiere was directed a year later in Houston by the Australian Opera Director, David Freeman. The English premiere was staged in 1985 by ENO, who now stage its new 2016 production in partnership with the LA Opera. The Egyptian and Hebrew texts are all taken from original sources, as indeed is the juggling whose source had been discovered as graffiti on the wall in an Egyptian tomb.
