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Review: “As You Like It,” by William Shakespeare Chicago Shakespeare Theatre To the inexorable swing of a towering clock’s pendulum, pretty youths love, a deposed duke awaits a better fate and a courtly fool beguiles the time in pursuit of a lusty shepherdess. All while we observers forget the hour in the enchantment of Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s “As You Like It.” Tick-tock. Though designer Kevin Depinet’s grand, ever-present

Review: "The Trinity River Plays," by Regina Taylor Goodman Theatre, Chicago When you’re lost to the world, lost in your own heart, sometimes the place to find yourself is where you started. Back where truth, like family and the river, is eternal. But it’s an ugly truth that abides with Iris, the aspiring young writer who flowers into a successful author in Regina Taylor’s three-part, long-arching “Trinity River Plays.” Iris, whom we first

Review: Puccini’s "La Fanciulla del West" Lyric Opera of Chicago Puccini’s take on the Gold Rush days of the American frontier, “La Fanciulla del West,” hangs around the fringes of the composer’s canon – and indeed the general repertoire – as something of an oddity, infrequently staged and, in its unfamiliarity, modestly prized. The title’s usual rendering in English as “The Girl of the Golden West,” faintly

I wasn’t at the Canadian Opera Company’s annual season announcement yesterday, to hear General Director Alexander Neef pitch the COC ‘s upcoming season. But music critic Robert Everett-Green of Toronto’s Globe and Mail was there. In addition to reporting on the COC’s slate of operas for 2011-12 (see here) he reported on something else. The German-born general director seemed somewhat exasperated by the suggestion that the Canadian Opera Company might want to make it a priority to perform some

  Every winter when the season programs are announced I spot a few absolutely-must-sees, a number of things that appeal, and great numbers of performances that don't interest me at all.  But fine music-making endures, and inevitably many of the best evenings come as a complete surprise. Here are ten of them, more or less.   In January I was bowled over by La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein in a most original production by Christoph Marthaler at the Stadtsteater Basel. Anne-Sofie von Otter

  Giulio Cesare Georg Frederic Handel Libretto by Nicola Francesco Haym, after Giacomo Francesco Bussani   Paris, Opéra Garnier   Conducted by Emmanuelle Haïm Production by Laurent Pelly (director & costumes), Chantal Thomas (sets), Joël Adam (lighting), Agathe Mélinand (dramaturg & assistant director)   With: Lawrence Zazzo (Cesare), Varduhi Abrahamyan (Cornelia), Isabel Leonard (Sesto), Natalie Dessay (Cleopatra), Christophe Dumieux (Tolomeo),

Talking about music has been famously compared to dancing about architecture – the point being that the two media have nothing in common. But of course musicians talk about music with each other all the time. And for this purpose they have developed their own specialized vocabulary. That’s fine for the musicians. But pity the poor music critic who must address a broad readership that may or may not have much musical training. A critic must consider whether it’s effectively communicative to pepper a review with terms

The NY Times critic Anthony Tommasini has asked his reading public to respond to what he characterizes as a "playful" approach to the age-old question, "What makes music great?" Tommasini has cut some videos and performed short lectures on traits of composers that could be proposed as great and in the interior of a paragraph asks readers, "Please challenge my analysis. Propose your own approaches." Rather than wait for Tommasini to complete his analyses or even view one of them, hundreds of

It’s that time of year again – when orchestras proudly truck out their offerings for the next season. The ritual of the annual press conference marks the culmination of a lengthy planning process, involving many considerations and priorities. Here’s a list of the various factors that must be carefully weighed when building a successful orchestral season.   What the conductor wants A big Beethoven cycle, a bigger Mahler cycle, and also lots of guest-conducting spots for his conductor-cronies so that

  Laurent Pelly's 2003 production of Ariadne auf Naxos has returned to Opera Bastille for eight performances this December. I was on hand to enjoy the show on opening night, December 11.   It's a typically quirky Pelly production, with the first act set in a grand and vaguely 30s-era salon dominated by a stairway and balcony downstage left, with falling snow visible beyond an upstage row of columns; the second act takes place in an abandoned construction site, with Ariadne asleep among

  Before the November 12 George London recital  at the Morgan Library I had a few minutes to peruse a heart-stopping exhibit, "Anne Morgan's War: Rebuilding Devastated France 1917-1924". The daughter of industrialist Pierpont Morgan, Anne Morgan found her life's purpose in mobilizing aid for the dispossessed of northeastern France. The Great War's unprecedented and shocking destruction, which reduced Picardy to rubble and the country folk to a life of unimaginable hardship, is vividly documented in

Review: “Home” by Samm-Art Williams Court Theatre, Chicago Home may be simply a place in the heart, but getting there can be an arduous journey. Cephus  Miles, a black man full of love and goodness, discovers just how long, convoluted and difficult that trip can be in playwright Samm-Art Williams’ “Home,” now on affectionate and soul-warming display at the Court Theatre. Williams, 64, born Samuel Arthur Williams in Burgaw, N.C., began his own

        When did it become de rigueur to stage the fanciful and flamboyant Les Contes d'Hoffmann in a black box, like the three versions I've seen in the past year in New York, Paris, and Frankfurt? It's bad enough to have such a colorful tale rendered noir, but Oper Frankfurt's new production, directed by Dale Duesing, eliminated not only light and color (other than Arno Bremers's jewel-tone modern costumes and the back-lighting on the unit set, a bar)

Review: “To Master the Art” Timeline Theatre, Chicago You can almost smell the savory food being prepared in “To Master the Art,” William Brown and Doug Frew’s new play about the blossoming of that incomparable maîtresse de la cuisine, Julia Child. Hey, wait a minute – you really can smell those shallots simmering in butter, just as Julia does in a revelatory moment at a little restaurant shortly after her arrival in France in 1948. That

Review: Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” at the Lyric Opera of Chicago Verdi’s 1859 opera “Un Ballo in Maschera” may be saddled with one of the weakest story lines the composer ever had to deal with, but it is a veritable garden of musical delights. And the Lyric Opera, in a staging of singular intimacy and conviction, gathers Verdi’s blossoms into bouquets of vocal splendor. It’s bizarre to think that “Un Ballo in

Toronto’s classical music scene has a lot going for it. But one thing that’s never been established here is an ongoing international piano competition. Back in 1985, the Bach International Piano Competition was launched with great fanfare. Unfortunately, it proved to be a one-off event. However, its first-prize winner, Angela Hewitt, achieved a distinguished international career – thereby endowing the ephemeral event with a 100 percent success rate, in terms of selecting laureates who go places. In the first week of

Franz Liszt’s Totentanz gets a bad press. This extravaganza of variations on the Dies Irae for piano and orchestra has been called “a ridiculously overblown piece of boom-boom music” by one critic, and larded with “heavy-footed exhibitionism” by another. For a would-be pianist like me, however, it’s more than a just guilty pleasure to experience it in concert: It is so full of unabashed key banging and jaw-dropping pyrotechics that it amounts to aural-visual primal-scream therapy. 

Review: Orchestre de Paris, Paavo Jarvi conducting; Elisabeth Leonskaya, piano, at the Salle Pleyel, Paris Each time I’ve heard the Orchestre de Paris on its home turf in recent years, I’ve wondered why this fine ensemble typically does not come up in conversations about the world’s great orchestras. In any case, whether because it doesn’t visit the United States very often or its recordings are unfamiliar to us, American critics seem to undervalue the Orchestre de Paris. I find it

    After living without a TV for most of my adult life I've recently become quite addicted to the Tube. An American who doesn't follow sports, I still don't own a set at home, but in France I turn the thing on as soon as the alarm goes off. TF2's  morning show, Telematin, helps me start each day in French, and to fill in time between weather and news bulletins the program runs segments that clue me in to cultural goings on in Paris and elsewhere in the Hexagon. After

  Il Trittico just completed its first run in Paris since 1987, and its very first appearance at Opéra Nationale de Paris, in Luca Ronconi's coproduction from La Scala. I thought it a mixed success: the spare, semi-abstract staging, lacked Puccini's signal specificity of place and looked even cheaper in the opera house than it did in La Scala's cinema broadcast. But it was a rare opportunity for Parisian audiences to see the trilogy, and some felicitous casting redeemed a not-so-exciting evening.