Month: October 2021

The Metropolitan Opera continues its season of Live in HD cinema productions with Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, an adaptation of the memoir by Charles M Blow and the first opera by a Black composer to be presented by the Met. The Washington Post describes the production as “A defiant, tender, and…

American Ballet Theatre opens its first New York Fall Season for two years with the gorgeous Romantic-era ballet Giselle. With choreography after Jules Perrot, Jean Coralli and Marius Petipa, Giselle – set to Adolphe Adam’s sumptuous score – is one of the oldest classical ballets continually performed by ballet companies around the world. Regarded as…

San Francisco Opera opens a new production of Beethoven’s Fidelio this week. Directed by Matthew Ozawa, whose “strikingly spare productions” (New York Times) are, says Opera News “a vivid demonstration of what opera is all about”. This new production brings forward Fidelio’s setting from an eighteenth-century prison to a modern government detainment center, with set…

Ballet Nice Méditerranée, under the artistic direction of Éric Vu-An, presents five works in a programme entitled Black Dances Matter – paying tribute to the influence of black artists in the history of dance. The company has a well-deserved reputation for versatility, and this is amply displayed across Vu-An’s Eden and Le Ballet de Faust,…

English National Opera has something to suit all tastes for the 2021-22 season – ranging from the seriousness of actuality to the frivolous and lighthearted, with a healthy dash of passion and tragedy thrown into the mix. Satyagraha, Philip Glass’s account of Mahatma Gandhi’s early years in South Africa, opens the season. Set to a…

Modest Mussorgsky’s magnificent historical opera, Boris Godunov, currently running at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, opens the Company’s Live in HD 2021-22 season. This production by Stephen Wadsworth, stars German bass René Pape in the title role, David Butt Philip as the pretender Grigory, and Maxim Paster as the powerful boyar Shuisky. German conductor…