Don Giovanni

Latest Articles

The naked truth

Letters to the Boston editor, April 2, 2010
I would like to register my protest against your “Naked Boston” issue’s needlessly titillating cover image of a nude, beheaded woman.
By BOSTON PHOENIX LETTERS | March 31, 2010

Double trouble

BLO's The Turn of the S crew, Levine's Carter and Simon Boccanegra, Teatro Lirico, the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet, and more
Boston Lyric Opera's debut Opera Annex production was so good in so many ways, it's painful that one bad idea just about sank it.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | February 09, 2010

Music and revenge

Elemental Theatre’s masterful Amadeus
As a play, Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus has more than its share of theatrical muscle.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | November 12, 2009

Scholarship gigs

Newpoli and Steven Bernstein do their homework
When in 1999 Björn Wennås moved from Sweden to Boston to study jazz guitar, he hardly imagined that he'd one day be playing in an ensemble that specializes in Italian folk music of the 12th to 19th centuries.
By JON GARELICK | August 04, 2009

French kiss

What we don't get in Boston
Productions I attended at the Opéra and Opéra Comique would be rare in New York, let alone Boston — though some of the performers would be familiar.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | July 10, 2009

Slideshow: Don Giovanni at Boston Lyric Opera

Don Giovanni at Boston Lyric Opera
Boston Lyric Opera presents Don Giovanni
By T. CHARLES ERICKSON | April 29, 2009

A little history

Yehudi Wyner and John Harbison, Susanna Mälkki with the BSO, Natalia Gutman with the BPO, and BLO's Don Giovanni
Two of Boston's most admired and honored composers (both Pulitzer winners) have just celebrated landmark birthdays: Yehudi Wyner his 80th and John Harbison his 70th.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | April 28, 2009

Contertizing

From Don Giovanni’s hell to Haydn’s Creation
Boston Lyric Opera follows up Dvorák’s moonstruck Rusalka, with Christopher Schaldebrand in the title role of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the BSO and much more.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | March 20, 2009

Puccini goes punk

Faced with diminishing mainstream opportunities, Boston's young opera singers are going small and making the repertoire their own
Perched on the lid of a lace-draped baby grand, a bobblehead quivers along with Christine Teeters's vibrato as she powers through a Tuesday-night voice lesson in the Steinway Piano Building on Boylston Street.
By SARA FAITH ALTERMAN | January 23, 2009

Magic bullets

Maurizio Pollini returns to the BSO; Opera Boston’s Der Freischütz
Last week’s Boston Symphony Orchestra program looked odd on paper, but the concert was a knockout.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | October 24, 2008

Opening pitch

James Levine’s gala and Brahms, Russell Sherman’s Liszt, the Bostonians’ Kurt Weill
The most moving moment of this year’s Boston Symphony Orchestra opening gala came before the concert started — the standing ovation for James Levine, who looked rested and recuperated after his kidney surgery this summer, an operation that forced him to cancel most of his Tanglewood season.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | October 01, 2008

All's fair?

Shakespeare + Company’s The Ladies Man; Gloucester Stage’s Billy Bishop
If Viagra had existed in La Belle Époque, The Ladies Man would be a very short show.
By CAROLYN CLAY | June 10, 2008

Conquering heroes

Winterreise from Thomas Quasthoff and James Levine, the Cecilia’s Handel, Levine’s return, Brendel’s farewell
One sign of Boston’s rich classical-music scene is that there are often hard choices to make when two outstanding events are scheduled at the same time.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | February 29, 2008

Streets where you live

A loverly My Fair Lady ; The Missionary Position at MRT
The 2001 National Theatre of Great Britain/Cameron Mackintosh production further sharpens the Shavian edge of this beloved musical.
By CAROLYN CLAY | February 12, 2008

‘A miracle!’

Emmanuel’s memorial for Craig Smith, plus Russell Sherman’s Bach, the Royal Concertgebouw, and Handel’s Semele
“Deep, tough, devout — and in church! It’s a miracle!”
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | February 05, 2008

Don ho!

On the road with Mozart and Molière in Don Juan Giovanni
In 1665, when it made a brief appearance before being suppressed for a couple of hundred years, Molière’s Don Juan was a “machine play.”
By CAROLYN CLAY | September 04, 2007

Would you like Mozart with that?

Don Juan Giovanni and Figaro fuse theater and opera
Tracy Chapman sang about revolution that “sounds like a whisper,” but at the American Repertory Theatre the French Revolution will be broadcast loud and clear.
By SALLY CRAGIN | August 21, 2007

Stand-up choreography

David Parker + the Bang Group
David Parker was born too late for vaudeville.
By DEBRA CASH | July 24, 2007

Tragic tropes and anti-tropes

NYCB's Romeo , Boston Ballet's Giselle
The only question to ask about a new Romeo and Juliet, besides “Why?”, is “Why New York City Ballet?”
By MARCIA B. SIEGEL | May 18, 2007

Oh Susanna

Ailyn Pérez shines in BLO’s Figaro; so does Gabriela Montero with the Boston Philharmonic
Music director Stephen Lord conducts a Figaro that clocks in close to three and a half hours but so engaging, few people will be checking their watches.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | May 01, 2007

Stormy weather

BSO cancellations, plus the Camerata, Jonathan Biss, Emmanuel Music, and more
The BSO has been having terrible luck hanging on to its star soloists.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | March 28, 2007

Operatic oboe

Instruments mimic vocalists
For centuries it has been the ultimate goal of instrumentalists to emulate the singing human voice.
By BEN MEIKLEJOHN | January 10, 2007

The best of times, the worst of times

A year in classical
This year Boston classical music lost some of its most beloved figures — some, like mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, at the very height of their extraordinary powers, others, like opera director Sarah Caldwell and her conductor/collaborator, Osbourne McConathy, after long and gratifying runs.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | December 20, 2006

Landmarks

The BSO’s Moses und Aron and Emmanuel Music’s Orlando
Seventy-four years after Schoenberg composed (but never finished) Moses und Aron , this towering 20th-century masterwork got its first Boston Symphony Orchestra performance.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | October 31, 2006

Transfigured nights

The BSO’s Schoenberg and Beethoven; Boston Baroque’s Don Giovanni; Opera Boston’s La clemenza di Tito
James Levine and the BSO resumed their Beethoven/Schoenberg series with superb performances of two pieces at the opposite ends of the Schoenberg spectrum.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | October 24, 2006

From Knoxville to Swan Lake and back

A chock-full season of classical music
As our most prestigious classical-music institution, the Boston Symphony Orchestra ought to be every year’s headliner, and once again, under the adventuresome direction of James Levine, it is.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | September 13, 2006

Opera, opera, opera

At Santa Fe and Tanglewood and in New York
Every performance at Santa Fe was packed, and few subscribers left unhappy.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | August 15, 2006

Mozart plus

James Levine’s Don Giovanni and Elektra ; Dubravka Tomsic at Newport
Tanglewood 2006 may well be remembered as the summer of James Levine’s Don Giovanni .
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | July 25, 2006

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson

1954–2006
We were very lucky, here in Boston, to have had so many chances to hear Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died in Santa Fe last Monday at the age of 52.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | July 11, 2006

Carried away

Frederic Rzewski, eighth blackbird, Yan Pascal Tortelier & the London Philharmonic, Emmanuel Krivine & the BSO, BLO’s La traviata, Teatro Lirico’s magical Flute
I’ve heard a lot of music in the past couple of weeks — concerts by two major symphony orchestras, with two major young violinists, a hot new-music group, and two opera productions.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | April 04, 2006