Hong Kong soprano Louise Kwong recently completed a run of two performances as the lead in Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème at the Opera di Roma, marking her debut with one of Italy’s leading companies.
The star of Opera Hong Kong’s recent Carmen might just be the set.
Based on her performance at the 29 April Grand Finals Concert, Wu Hongni was declared one of the five winners of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions.
The Teatro Dom Pedro V is a gem. Built in 1860, it both looks like and is a traditional theatre, with gold-fluted columns, plaster molding and orchestra pit. It is, for better or worse (and in many ways better), small with fewer than 300 seats. One can hardly think of a more idyllic place in…
Not all operas or performances are about the singers. The star of the Welsh National Opera’s performance of Pelléas et Mélisande at the Hong Kong Arts Festival was its orchestra and conductor Lothar Koenigs who did Claude Debussy’s seamless score proud.
It’s not often, if ever, that Hong Kong holds two opera world premieres in a single week; 2018 is off to a good start.
Nicholas Gordon talks to Neal Goren, music director for the world premier run of the chamber opera Mila at the Asia Society in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong can be a curious place. Ghost Love is a new Putonghua-language chamber opera, conceived and written locally, receiving what is—insofar as I can tell—its world premier this weekend, and yet, despite a number of attractive posters placed around town, there is hardly any mention of this in the press or online.
Rather than mounting a second production, Hong Kong’s newest opera company, “More than Musical”, decided to reprise La Traviata, first shown here in June. This was probably a wise decision, artistically and logistically; after all, due to the deliberately small size of the spaces that the company uses for intimacy, only a few hundred people—fewer…
Nicholas Gordon talks to Chinese operatic soprano Lei Xu, who is singing Violetta in More Than Musical’s production of La Traviata.
A selection of photos from Musica Viva’s “La Bohème”, December 2017.
Musica Viva’s current production of Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème is a vivid justification for Hong Kong’s support of two opera companies. Different strategies yield different outcomes, to the great advantage of Hong Kong’s cultural scene. Musica Viva’s use of, in general, younger singers (“young” in opera being a relative term) and Director-General Kingman Lo’s focus…
This November in New York has featured three different versions of the Madame Butterfly story on stage: the original at the Metropolitan Opera, a revival of the David Henry Hwang play M. Butterfly and a revival of the musical Miss Saigon. Of these, I managed Hwang and Puccini back-to-back.
Why do people still sit spellbound through works of musical theatre that are dozens of decades old, written in and about times that have long passed from living memory? There is of course the music and the wonder of the unamplified voice, but opera is also, critically, about the story. There is love, passion, betrayal,…
Whether the casts for this week’s Aida are the best ever assembled for opera in Hong Kong—they have some competition from Hong Kong Arts Festival productions, including a Simon Boccanegra with Roberto Frontali, Michele Pertusi, Giorgio Berrugi and Erika Grimaldi, and a Traviata with Carmen Giannattasio and José Bros—is the sort of thing opera-goers love…