Ah that great Armide again

Armida, Komische Oper Berlin, December 13 2010

Superb Elena Semenova in the revival of Calixto Bieito's production of Armida

Conductor ..... Konrad Junghänel
Director ..... Calixto Bieito

Armida ..... Elena Semenova
Hidraot ..... Tómas Tómasson
Rinaldo ..... Norman Shankle
Artemidoro ..... Christoph Schröter
Ubaldo ..... Günter Papendell
Der dänische Ritter ..... Thomas Ebenstein
Phénice ..... Olivia Vermeulen
Sidonie ..... Julia Giebel
Aronte ..... Hans-Peter Scheidegger
Der Hass ..... Karolina Gumos
Ein Dämon in Gestalt der Melissa ..... Anna Borchers
Der Mann mit der Schlange ..... Carsten Wykrota

Chorus and Orchestra of Komische Oper Berlin

Nightingale in Aix 2010: Une grosse tarte japonaise :)

Pretty music by Stravinsky --superbly played by the orchestra of the Lyon National Opera and conducted by always reliable maestro Kazushi Ono-- and the string of wonderful singers compensated a theatrical void staged in a Disney-World like fashion by Robert Lepage.

Nabil Suliman and Olga Peretyatko

You can see this ~50 minute long opera on Arte Live Web for free. Fast forward to about 100th minute when The Nightingale actually begins and enjoy.
In my humble opinion, what precedes this opera is far more interesting than The Nightingale itself. It's a selection of Russian songs that Stravinsky adapted for voice and orchestra, as well as the original songs he composed, all inspired by the Russian fairy tales. In that part Lepage too does a nice job by visualizing the stories by quickly mounting a shadow-theater. Only the last songs were spoiled by the excessive artistic gymnasts' performance in the same shadow theater...

Stravinsky's Nightingale from Aix

I didn't see last 20 minutes of Don Giovanni :(
Will comment on the Tcherniakov's production --which I tenderly loved-- once I see these last 20 minutes and I'm a liiiittle less busy.

Tonight, you can all try and see the Robert Lepage's production of The Nightingale



Thanks to the coolest TV in the Universe, it's free and it will start at 8 pm (Paris time - c.e.t). Bless Arte Live Web ;)

Information about the show can be found here. Our fave Kazushi Ono will conduct. With such a fantastic singers, I have no doubt that musicwise this will be 100 minutes of pure pleasure. As for the production itself, you already know that Robert Lepage's terabytes of computer images in an otherwise Zeffirelli's concept of theater are not what I like the most. So here is a hoping tonight we'll see a show in which the images do not hide the emptiness of content [like it was the case in the past, c.f. this].

FYI, French press is full of praise for this production,  which is certainly pleasant but says very little about the real quality of the show [French critique is 'atrocious' for the most part]. A short video about the show can be found here.

Ed: Olga Peretyatko and Elena Semenova are AMAZING singers. Nabil Suliman is very good too. In the show that we're about to see tonight they will combine live with the performance recorded last night. Olga complained on her blog about a sore throat she inadvertently woke up with yesterday, and the whole production team was freaking out all day... How it will all finish we'll see tonight. Good luck Olga [Удачи Оля!] :)