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12150

Verdi – Un giorno di regno – Teatro Regio di Parma – DVD
The famous failure of Verdi's 2nd opera must fall on the libretto; it's a comic opera that forgets to be funny. (Seriously, how is...

Rossini – L’inganno felice – Opera Sarasota – Streamed for $25
One of the most impressive small opera companies in the U.S., Sarasota is known to delve deep into Italian repertoire – they recently...

12149

Janacek – Vec Makropulos – Salzburg Opera Festival (2011) – Blu-Ray
I love this opera thriller which plays like a movie, consisting mostly of short, dramatic dialogues. Several musical...

Rossi – The Enchanted Palace – Opera de Dijon – Streaming on Operavision
This is the first production of this opera since the 1640s; it’s a treasure trove of early-Baroque music with a vivid...

San Francisco Opera is going to stream their 2018 Ring Cycle on their website over the course of the month of March. Each entry will be available on demand for free on Saturdays, starting with Der...

Beethoven – Fidelio – Birmingham Opera Company (2002) – Streaming on Operavision until 2/24
This is a very unusual staging; one of Graham Vick’s immersive performances where the audience is part of...

Oh wow! Great finds. I can't believe they're captioned too. I keep reading that Smetana fans seem to especially love "The Kiss".

I know you what mean. When I first heard Rusalka I was skeptical about the story, but the music is so good that I fell in love with it. Like La Traviata, too. I think it's dramatically very good and...

Handel – Trionfo – Staatsoper Hannover – Streaming on Operavision
Restrictions: No chorus, singers distanced
I don’t know which of the many versions of this oratorio Hannover used, but I was really...

Britten – Curlew River – Barbican Centre (2013)
Curlew River was the first of Britten’s 3 “church parables” which were inspired by the stylization of Japanese Noh plays, and cleverly recasts these...

I'm watching the Birmingham one this week!

Over the holidays, the streams I watched had an unintentional theme of all being productions affected by COVID restrictions. Rather than find them sobering reminders of 2020, I like to find hope for...

If all things go well - vaccines on their way to being approved in record time - I hope to see my first live opera in a year in March. The Dallas Opera is sticking to their schedule, at 30% capacity,...

12148

Verdi - Attila - Teatro Comunale di Bologna - Blu-Ray
This production is modern enough to be dark and ugly, but old-fashioned enough to be park-and-bark. Truly forgettable staging. Amazing...

I needed to reach my quota of baroque operas in 2020:

Monteverdi – Il ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria – National Theatre Mannheim – Streamed on Operavision
This was the first time I’ve seen...

Pandemic-Era Opera Videos

I think made-for-video operas is a genre which could do a lot to raise the profile of opera among younger generations, and now that opera companies have been forced to...

Braunfels – Die Vögel – Bayerische Staatsoper – Streamed on staatsoper.tv
Sadly, the Staatsoper was only able to perform this once before the theatre was shut down again. It’s a gem of a...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEapgzDdr0s

While most of the university opera departments in my area seem to be skipping performance all together, Rice University’s opera department quickly made...

I can relate! Santa Fe Opera finally announced their next summer festival, and I'm going to buy season tickets. Even with the uncertainty. (New Mexico currently has a mandatory 2-week quarantine on...

12144

Offenbach – La Belle Helene – Paris Chatelet (2000) – DVD
A suitably silly production of one of Offenbach’s mythology-based satires, if not Laurent Pelly’s most memorable. It always makes...

Ooooh. Sold. This does sound like something I'd like.

Bellini – I Puritani – Oper Stuttgart – Streamed on Operavision
The singing is really terrific; I came for Rene Barbera – who has dazzling high notes, only the high F at the end showed signs of...

Texas has taken a laissez-faire approach to containing the pandemic, and so from what I can tell University music departments have moved to virtual recitals for instrumentalists, and no performances...

Zandonai – Francesca da Rimini – Metropolitan Opera – Streamed on Met On Demand
Judging solely by this, Zandonai doesn’t seem to be a composer of memorable melodies. But there’s still a lot to like...

I think I'm going to stop doing the monthly thing; I tend to watch things late in their viewing cycle, and I hate talking about them after they've gone. (I just don't want to take over this whole...