Sunday, December 22

Tag: Sondra Radvanovsky

Andréa Chenier – Royal Opera House
London

Andréa Chenier – Royal Opera House

David McVicar’s spectacular staging of Umberto Giordano’s epic verismo opera of revolution and forbidden love from 2015 is brought back to life by Revival Director Thomas Guthrie with the orchestra under the baton of Antonio Pappano in his last production as Music Director of The Royal Opera. At a glittering party in 18th-century Paris there are distinctly two tiers of society on display from the lowly footman Gérard (Amartuvshin Enkhbat) who follows in the footsteps of his father who has been in service for sixty years, to the sumptuous host, Contessa di Coigny (Rosalind Plowright), whose daughter Maddalena (Sondra Radvanovsky) straddles both as she eschews the fancy dress and faux manners in favour of intellectual discussion, so when the poet Andréa Chenier (Jonas Kaufmann) delivers a...
The Met Live in HD: Medea – The Metropolitan Opera
REVIEWS

The Met Live in HD: Medea – The Metropolitan Opera

Originally written in French in 1797, The Met premiere the later Italian version of Cherubini’s rarely performed masterpiece, based on Euripides’ and Corneille’s tragedies, to open their new season in a co-production with the Greek National Opera, Canadian Opera Company, and Lyric Opera of Chicago. Spurning antiquity, director David McVicar sets the piece somewhere around the time of its original writing with a distinctly Gallic nod towards the French Revolution that would follow, and the straightforward simplicity of the set, which he also designed, is sympathetic to an audience mostly unfamiliar with the work. The breathless overture recedes to introduce Glauce (Janai Brugger), daughter of Creonte (Michele Pertusi), King of Corinth, and her impending marriage to Giasone (Matthew Po...