The mastermind behind this success is nevertheless Italian: Francesco Lanzillotta , who is leading a very fine career in Italy but is still relatively little known in France, offers at the head of an Orchester national d'Île-de-France in large forms a brilliant reading of Donizetti's masterpiece. We are grateful to the Italian conductor for believing in this music and for respecting...
That performances of Les Troyens, with its enormous cast, are an ‘event’ goes without saying but with a cast as starry as tonight’s, expectations were stratospheric. The Strasbourgeois assembled 350 performers tonight – a super-sized orchestra, including six harps, numerous off-stage bands, sixteen soloists and three choruses, including one placed off-stage and, at times, in the aud...
MITRIDATE, RE DI PONTO was written in 1770 by the fourteen-year-old Mozart for his first tour of Italy. The prodigy stuck rigidly to the opera seria form, and Mitridate’s string of da capoarias is varied only by a wonderful duet and a brief final ensemble. What points to the composer’s great future is the keen sense of characterization, along with the age-defying depth of emotion in...
We never cease to admire Mozart's precocious genius... At an age when many teenagers naturally have dreams and concerns of their age, he composed Mithridates, his first opera seria on a libretto adapted from the Racine's eponymous tragedy. From the outset, the work was both a masterstroke and a major success for his young career as a composer. In 1770, Mozart was 14 years old and mad...
Inspired by Racine's Mithridates (1673), this eponymous opera composed in 1770 by a Mozart who was just 14 years old is musically brilliantly performed. Too bad that the staging of this production given at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées is almost non-existent… The mise en abyme – or theater in the theater – is a process commonly used in stage productions. So here we are in the back...