Snap Out of It! The Met Live in HD Festival

Opera company teases season with eleven days of outside broadcasts.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Opera lovers: Cher (left) and Nicolas Cage (right) in a production still from Moonstruck.
Image © 1987 MGM.

The Metropolitan Opera has settled its labor crisis, just in time for the company's annual 11-night celebration of general manager Peter Gelb's Live in HD series. This has been one of the better initiatives of the Gelb administration, an annual goodwill gesture inviting opera lovers to Lincoln Center Plaza to watch past broadcasts on a giant screen mounted on the Grand Tier balcony.

Opera Review: Not the Jack You Know

Dell'Arte Opera presents Falstaff...by Antonio Salieri.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Windsor Forest in a wrestling singlet: Gary Ramsey (center) stars in Falstaff.
Photo by Brian Long © 2014 Dell'Arte Opera Ensemble.

Thanks to the 1984 Academy Award-winning film Amadeus, the composer Antonio Salieri is, to most people "the guy who killed Mozart."  Last week, the Dell'Arte Opera Ensemble, currently in the middle of a festival celebrating operatic adaptations of the work of Shakespeare, chose to mount Salieri's 1799 opera Falstaff, ossia il tre Burle ("The Three Jokes"), providing some much needed healing for this unjustly ignored composer, whose forty operas lie mostly in the locked desk drawers of history.

Opera Review: A Well-Dressed and Interesting Monster

Handel comes back to Mostly Mozart with Acis and Galatea.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Happy three: Thomas Cooley, Yulia van Doren and Michael Williams
in Acis and Galatea at the Mostly Mozart Festival.

Not every opera composer got to tell the same story twice.

Georg Frederic Handel did though, with Acis and Galatea, the sole operatic offering of this summer's Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. The opera contains some of the composer's most inspired late music for the stage and remains one of the composer's most beloved works.

Concert Review: Future to Past

The violinist Christian Tetzlaff at Mostly Mozart.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The violinist Christian Tetzlaff. Photo © 2014 by Klaus Rudolph.

The month-long Mostly Mozart festival at Lincoln Center is usually where listeners go to escape accidental exposure to any works that might have been written in the past 200 years. The festival's focus is, after all Mozart with occasional leavenings of Beethoven and Bach. So it was a surprise that Wednesday's concert opened with a piece by...Alfred Schnittke?

Concert Review: Famous Last Words

The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra plays Beethoven and Haydn.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Watch out for that tree: pianist Steven Osborne.
Photo by Eric Richmond © 2014 from the artist's website 

The term "classical" music takes its name from the so-called "classical" era, from 1774 to 1827. This was a time where composers became interested in writing structured works that adhered to their perception of architectural perfection in the Greek and Roman ("classic") style. These composers, which include Gluck, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven became masters of putting beautiful content into strict form and their work still endures like those ruins in Italy and Greece.

Opera Review: A Girl with a Bad Reputation

Bard SummerScape presents Euryanthe.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Hand jive: Euryanthe (Ellie Dehn) and Eglantine (Wendy Bryn Harmer) face off in
a scene from Weber's romantic opera Euryanthe. Photo by Cory Weaver © 2014 Bard SummerScape.

Carl Maria von Weber's Euryanthe has finally beaten the odds.

The opera, which is running at the Bard Festival as part of that institution's SummerScape series, has overcome a bad libretto, a hard-to-pronounce title (it's "Oy-ree-an-theh") and consignment to the yawning void reserved for German romantic operas that were written before the rise of Richard Wagner. These performances, conducted by Bard president Leon Botstein at the helm of the American Symphony Orchestra mark the first fully staged performances of the opera in the U.S. since a brief run at the Met in the 1914-15 season.

Concert Review: The Prodigy as Prodigal Son

Mostly Mozart opens (formally) in style.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Conductor Louis Langrée returns to lead Mostly Mozart.
Photo © 2014 Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

The Mostly Mozart Festival is the oldest of Lincoln Center's summer performing arts extravaganzas. In recent years, the stewardship of music director Louis Langrée has led to a resurgence in quality. The addition of a special concert stage reconfigures Avery Fisher Hall into a more intimate venue. The audience is seated in part on the Philharmonic stage,  and the musicians play on a specially constructed platform under a set of baffles designed to brighten the sound of the room.

Summer Marches On: The 2014 Superconductor Festival Guide Part II

Three big festivals make New York more bearable in the summer.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Lincoln Center becomes a cultural oasis in the summer months.
Unfortunately that's not a real palm tree. Photo alteration by the author.

The Rolling Stones once said "you can't always get what you want." For New Yorkers sweltering through summer heat, that might translate to "you can't always get out of town." For those city-bound urbanites or visitors to this great metropolis, Mostly Mozart is the ideal cure, a shelter of musical marvels in the helter-skelter of a summer swelter. (And yes, readers, I know that's from an entirely different song.)

Summer Marches In: The 2014 Superconductor Festival Guide Part I

Your guide to getting out of New York and hearing great music.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Soprano Ellie Dehn is Euryanthe at Bard SummerScape.
Photo by Todd Norwood © 2014 Bard Festival.

As summer marches in, the festival season is upon us. Here's the Superconductor guide to getting out of New York for spectacular scenery, gorgeous music, and opera performances that you'll read about here in the next two months.