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  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.

Review: Orchestre de Paris, Andris Nelsons conducting; pianist Michaela Ursuleasa. Salle des Concerts, Cité de la Musique, Paris Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons’ intriguing program with the Orchestre de Paris on Oct. 29 featured two works with philosophical overtones by Richard Strauss, the late “Metamorphosen” for 23 strings and the opulently orchestrated “Also sprach Zarathustra,” written nearly 50 earlier.

Review: Chekhov’s “The Seagull” at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago Occasionally, the manifestation of a great theater company can rival the brilliance of the play at hand. Case in point: the Goodman Theatre’s thoroughly rewarding production of Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” Viewed from any perspective – director Robert Falls’ uncluttered concept, designer Todd Rosenthal’s barely adorned deep-thrust  stage, the uniformly fluent and specific

Michael Steinberg’s program notes declared: 

The Symphony No. 1 is the culmination of Walton’s conquest of maturity. One can make a strong case that this music is at a level of compositional ambition, concentration, and sheer human urgency and strength that Walton would not reach again.

 As I heard the music for the first time live in the San Francisco Symphony’s Davies Hall last Saturday, I agreed with the late and marvelous annotator, except that I would add

    I'm a bit late weighing in on Das Rheingold at the Met, but after all the brouhaha over the new $45 million high-tech Ring production, it seems that Robert LePage and company have delivered an utterly traditional First Festival Evening in every way that matters. The saga is presented without heavy subtext, other than the PR for the unit set whose weight required costly reinforcement to the Met stage. The rotating girders and interactive projections (the latter used by Le Page to more dramatic effect

Review: Chicago Symphony Orchestra Pierre Boulez, conductor, at Orchestra Hall. It was hard to know what to admire most about the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s eloquent and evocative turn through Mahler’s Seventh Symphony on Oct. 14 at Orchestra Hall: the sheer intellectual virtuosity of the composer, the front-to-back brilliance of the orchestra or the illuminating mastery of conductor Pierre Boulez. However you measure it, this Mahler – a hastily determined replacement for the Cherubini

Review: Bizet’s “Carmen”  at the Lyric Opera of Chicago Bizet’s ever-popular “Carmen” must be the closest thing to a sure-fire winner in the operatic canon. With its alluring anti-heroine and a score replete with great tunes so familiar that most of the audience could sing along, it’s a virtual slam-dunk. Except when it isn’t, quite. Such a rule-proving exception is a revival of the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s “Carmen” that first came to

Review: Shakespeare’s "Romeo and Juliet" at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre The rewards of Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s “Romeo and Juliet” are substantial, and they take the viewer to rare levels of energy, insight and humanity in what is arguably the most devastating of Shakespeare’s plays. Yet almost as imposing are the problems in this production, which steadily loses focus through the second half, with Ariel Shafir’s bravura Mercurio removed from the picture

Review: David Mamet’s "Oleanna" and "Speed-the-Plow" at American Theatre Company, Chicago You have to love playwright David Mamet’s brand of cynicism. It is unbending, relentless and concise. To which one must add, virtuosic. One helping of Mamet’s dark view of the human spirit invariably requires some time to process, which perhaps explains why the American Theater Company is doing his two short plays “Oleanna” and “Speed-the-Plow” not as a

Review: Edward Albee’s “At Home at the Zoo” at Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre, Chicago Peter and Ann are cruising along in a marital comfort zone. Which means he’s bored and she’s angry – at him. She’s seething, actually, with a feral rage. Ann even fantasizes about regressing into animalistic ferocity. And so Peter retreats further into the ennui of his work as a book editor. Until suddenly, astonishingly, it is he who finds himself with blood on his claws.