Opera Lafayette has taken on a prodigiously ambitious task in tackling the “reawakening” of Ludwig van Beethoven’s single operatic masterpiece (Fidelio) by giving us the composer’s earlier and little-known work Leonore (1805) as a modern premiere. Everything about it pointed to a singularly important Washington event at Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater, and serious opera lovers […]
Review: Venus and Adonis from Opera Lafayette
Celebrating Opera Lafayette’s twenty-fifth season, Ryan Brown has brought a rare and truly exquisite small gem of an opera to Washington audiences. To do so, Brown has left his more familiar continental excavations of early operatic repertoire and jumped the Channel to England to the court of Charles II where, in John Blow’s composition, he […]
Opera Lafayette performs Erminia and La forêt enchantée (The Enchanted Forest) Review
Watching a Baroque opera delivered by Ryan Brown and Opera Lafayette can feel like a refreshing “re-set” time-travel from warp-speed to the pace of a gently-moving skiff down a lazy river. Even the opening warm up tuning the delicate classical instruments feels leisurely and quite frankly helps us return our ever-bombarded ears to the warmest […]
Opera in Washington – The 2016-2017 Season
– Notes from the talk delivered by Susan Galbraith at The Smithsonian on August 16th – On a good day in the Greater Washington area there are more than 15 opera companies of various ilks and sizes. Not all present regular programming. Some, like Lorin Maazel’s Castleton (still in hiatus after the maestro’s death), or Wolf […]
Catone in Utica from Opera Lafayette (review)
There’s much to learn watching a production being remounted by essentially the same team. The riches and new challenges proved fascinating in the rarity of Vivaldi’s Catone in Utica that played for two performances this past weekend at the Kennedy Center.
Les Fêtes de l’Hymen et de l’Amour, ou Les Dieux d’Égypte
If you thought opera was an art form dedicated to the “park and bark” supersized, you would have your assumptions happily blasted away at Opera Lafayette’s celebratory dance mash with slithering aqua body-suited Nile creatures, an Amazon army of gorgeous jingling-footed Indian dancers, and early-form French-court ballet dancers with their graceful port de bras and […]
Actéon
Opera Lafayette bounded onto the stage at the Terrace Theatre this week offering a “post-modern” baroque opera that was both elegant and fresh. Artistic Director Ryan Brown teamed up with choreographer Seán Curran in a remount of Actéon, a minor classic by seventeenth century French composer Marc-Antoin Charpentier, that Brown’s company has given us straight […]
Le Roi et le Fermier
Opera Lafayette will be playing the Palace. Having had one performance at the Kennedy Center, Opera Lafayette next moves its production of this 18th century opera to NYC and then to the palace of Versailles