La bohème at the Festival Theatre (Edinburgh)

The Times (U.K.)

FIRST NIGHT: EDINBURGH FESTIVALS

Edinburgh opera review: La bohème at the Festival Theatre

To realise so many characters in music and movement with such tenderness and clarity is ensemble work of the highest order

By Anna Picard

August 28 2017, 12:01am,

FIVE STARS
Step out of the theatre and you can see them on the pavements: laughing, talking and kissing; falling in love and running out of money. Animated and individuated by Puccini in 1896, Henri Murger’s composite characters from the Quartier Latin of 1840s Paris have never grown old. In Àlex Ollé’s production of La bohème, brought to the Edinburgh Festival by Teatro Regio Torino and the conductor Gianandrea Noseda, only the period and the location have changed

10 Days at the Salzburg Festival, Classical Music's Disneyland

The New York Times

By Zachary Woolfe

SALZBURG, Austria — For music lovers, the Salzburg Festival is like Disneyland — not just because it’s a playground, but also because it requires a game plan. Each day of its six weeks is jammed with sometimes six, seven or eight performances. You are not, I repeat not, going to hear everything...

Verdi's Requiem - Gianandrea Noseda at the Edinbugh International Festival

The Scotsman

By David Kettle

FIVE STARS

Edinburgh International Festival: It’s become a cliché to say that in his Requiem, Verdi transplanted the drama of the opera house into the church – or, in this case, the concert hall. 

But when the performers are soloists, orchestra and chorus from Turin’s Teatro Regio, already in town for stagings of Macbeth and La bohème, that statement becomes all the more true.

This was a magnificently hair-raising account under Gianandrea Noseda – unashamedly theatrical, but never calculating or played for shallow effect. He kept his forces on a tight leash, yet it still felt as if we were discovering the work for the first time. Expansive and unhurried in slower movements, he drove Verdi’s faster music onwards furiously... 

A Pianist With Modern Flair Takes Over the Salzburg Festival →

The New York Times

By Michael Cooper

SALZBURG, Austria — The last time Markus Hinterhäuser worked with the South African artist William Kentridge and the German baritone Matthias Goerne, he was the accompanist — bringing his intense, sensitive piano playing to their multimedia production of Schubert’s “Winterreise” song cycle, which won wide praise and went on to tour the world...

William Kentridge’s Triumphant ‘Wozzeck’ Will Come to the Met Opera

The New York Times

By Zachary Woolfe

SALZBURG, Austria — For those who were dizzied by the artist William Kentridge’s frenetic productions of “The Nose” and “Lulu” at the Metropolitan Opera, he starts his extraordinary new “Wozzeck” with a self-deprecating joke. As the opera opens, the title character, a cruelly exploited soldier who murders his lover in a fit of jealousy, is screening a very Kentridge kind of animated film: jittery black-and-white drawings, surreal juxtapositions and swiftly flowing images.