Seven hamburgers

While in Rome in 2006, I have devised with my friend Bruno a project to taste the best ice-creams in that city. We used a top-5 list available in one Lonely Planet guide (or something like that) and it was really fun to visit places of all kinds in the four coins of the city [...]

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Back to the bench

The Zoo Story is Edward Albee’s first success and dates from 1958. This one-acter has an intriguing story full of unusual details, but recently the playwright thought it important to give a bit more information to the audiences and wrote a first act to it, premièred only recently. In the New York first production of [...]

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Again Aida

The Met’s Aida is a monumental affair, and those who have seen it with monumental voices know how effective it can be. It sounds really empty when the huge sceneries have to work the magic alone while the orchestra is muted to accomodate small-scaled voices. This saturday a debut in such a fearsome role was [...]

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Flesh vs. spirit

Christian Gerhaher’s baritone is obviously beautiful and he has made a reputation as a Lieder singer (and Schubert lookalike). For his Carnegie Hall recital he chose to sing the composer’s song cycle Die schöne Müllerin. I have to confess to be surprised that his very good intentions were impared by a vocal method that could [...]

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The beautiful and the beastly

I cannot recall a program so exotic as the one proposed by the New York Philharmonic – Beethoven’s 2nd Piano Concerto and Zemlinsky one-acter Eine florentinische Tragödie. I had no experience of conductor James Conlon in the Classical repertoire and he surprised me positively with an elegant, forward-moving and sensitive account on Beethoven’s early piano [...]

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Low-voltage Mahler

In a series of concert with the Cleveland Orchestra, Franz Welser-Möst chose for his second program Mahler’s 2nd Symphony, a piece the main difficulty of which in live performances seems to be awake genuine enthusiasm in the musicians while keeping the complex ensembles functional and transparent. The Austrian conductor certainly succeded in eliciting elegance and [...]

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Sir Colin Davis

In a sort of celebration of Sir Colin Davis’s 80th birthday, the Lincoln Center offered two concerts with the English conductor leading his London Symphonic Orchestra and Chorus. I was able to attend the first program – Mozart’s piano concerto no. 27 and Requiem. Imogen Cooper offered elegant Mozartian playing without the music-box approach so [...]

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Too much nose and too little heart

Before I say anything, I must be sincere about my dislike of Edmond Ronstand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. Beautiful as Ronstand’s verses are, the “what” never was a novelty and the “how” is marred by colossal lack of timing – the comedy scenes take ages to take off and the dramatic scenes are rather sentimentalised. In [...]

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Finding a feminine voice

Sarah Treem’s A Feminine Ending tells the story of Amanda, a young graduate of music who wants to be a composer, but is confronted with a world there is not necessarily a place for a woman. This seems not to be a problem for the playwright herself: Treem’s masters the art of intelligent and insightful [...]

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Pin it on the Agrippina

Maybe because she comes from Argentina, director Lillia Groag was able to portray the rotten charm of corruption without falling either in the trap of moralising or draining away the nastiness to make it funny. But that does not explain entirely the success of the New York City Opera production of Agrippina – Ms. Groag [...]

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