By Robert Croan After starting her tenure as Florida Grand Opera’s general director with a spectacular avant-garde, high-tech staging of Mozart’s The Magic Flute in November 2024, Maria Todaro followed with a traditional, well-sung if visually uneventful production of Gaetano Donizetti’s melodious, undemanding old chestnut, L’elisir d’amore (The Elixir of Love) — seen Feb. … [Read more...]
FGO’s ‘Orfeo’ too sensitive for Gluck’s own good
Aside from Claudio Monteverdi’s operas, Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, which premiered in Vienna in 1762, is the earliest opera in regular repertory. Its abundance of graceful melody, compelling story and absence of the stiffness of the prevailing opera seria put it there, and not incidentally so did its use of orchestral accompaniment in the recitatives … [Read more...]