Emily Magee reviews
Puccini: La Fanciulla del West
Emily Magee, Roberto Aronica, Claudio Sgura, Bruno Lazzaretti, John Paul Huckle; Chorus & Orchestra of the Teatro di San Carlo/Juraj Valčuha; dir. Hugo de Ana (Dynamic; DVD)
Wagner: Die Walküre (ROH/Pappano)
Nina Stemme, John Lundgren, et al; Orchestra of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden/Antonio Pappano (Opus Arte / DVD)
An iconic staging of Wagner’s Die Walküre
The cast in this 2018 staging would have been the envy of every world class opera company. The result is just short of perfection
Andrés Orozco-Estrada conducts Strauss's Salome
Some claim that Richard Strauss’s Salome is a symphonic poem with voices added. That’s how Andrés Orozco-Estrada interprets it, missing the essential drive of the operatic narrative. True, many of the motifs are orchestrally led, but quite a few fit the words (‘Er ist schreklich’ – ‘he is horrible’, as Salome sings of John the Baptist; or ‘Gib mir den Kopf des Jokanaan’ – ‘give me the head of Jokanaan’).