By Dennis D. Rooney Leoš Janáček’s operas, particularly Jenůfa and Káťa Kabanová, have now become established repertory works, albeit still at the fringes. The Cunning Little Vixen, from 1924, is one of his most accessible. The composer based the libretto on a story first told in comic strip form in Lidové noviny, his hometown newspaper in Brno, the Moravian capital. … [Read more...]
Women outclass the men in Miami Music Festival’s ‘Crucible’
The American composer Robert Ward lived a long, productive life, and by the time he died in 2013 at age 95, he had made at least one substantial contribution to the operatic repertoire. That work was his 1961 opera, The Crucible, based on the Arthur Miller play of the same name that allegorized the McCarthy “witch hunts” of the 1950s through the medium of the actual hunts … [Read more...]