Paris has a close connection with Verdi’s most ambitious and – in the five-act version now at the Bastille Opera – longest work. A French-language version of Don Carlo was first performed in the city in March 1867, with an … Read More
It’s not exactly news that life for women in Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban was a nightmare, but the animated film Les Hirondelles de Kaboul (The Swallows of Kabul), by Zabou Breitman and Eléa Gobbé-Mévellec, offers a pertinent … Read More
Update, July 21, 2019: On July 4, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo presented Délia and Alexandre Romanès with the Médaille Grand Vermeil de la Ville de Paris, the city’s highest honor, in recognition of their work in preserving tzigane culture and, … Read More
It certainly makes a good story: Molière, playing the role of Argan the hypochondriac in his play Le Malade Imaginaire, is said to have died onstage in the middle of the fourth performance on February 17, 1673. The reality is … Read More
With the necessary fusion of so many musical and theatrical forces, staging opera can be a hazardous business, as was demonstrated at the second performance of Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski’s new production of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1934 opera Lady Macbeth of … Read More
Some might think that foregoing one of the final days of late-summer sunshine to spend over five hours cooped up in a theater watching Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde demonstrates either an admirable sense of duty or complete madness. When … Read More
In the opera world, it has now become the rule rather than the exception to pair Maurice Ravel’s 1911 one-act opera L’Heure Espagnole with Giacomo Puccini’s 1918 single-act Gianni Schicchi. It is easy to see why: although each piece … Read More
Giuseppe Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball), currently onstage at the Bastille Opera in Paris, has had a checkered history. The germ of the story is the assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden at a masked ball in … Read More
Imagine the scene. German director Claus Guth has been asked to create a new production of Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème for the Bastille Opera House in Paris. “I need to shake up this old chestnut.” he says to himself. “Let … Read More
In “Le Penseur,” a one-man show focusing on the character and work of sculptor Auguste Rodin, we can see a clear parallel between Rodin’s passion for creating art and author, director and actor Jean-Baptiste Seckler’s passion for this play, now … Read More
