A comic opera double consisting of the Hong Kong premiere of George’s Bizet’s Le docteur Miracle and a new production Gaetano Donizetti’s Rita was presented by Opera Hong Kong in cooperation with HKUST on 15 May 2023 association with the French May Arts Festival.
Category Archive: Classical music
The winner of Musica Viva’s 2018 inaugural Hong Kong International Operatic Singing Competition, Norwegian soprano Margrethe Fredheim, joined third place and audience prize winner, Chinese soprano Chen Yibao, in a return concert 17 June 2023 headlined by renowned Korean soprano Sumi Jo, who had been one of the competition’s judges.
The first half of May was been a busy fortnight for opera in the Greater Bay Area. The renowned Chinese soprano He Hui sang her first Wagner role, Senta in Der fliegende Holländer, at the Guangzhou Opera House on 5 and 7 May, a dramatic move (literally and figuratively) away from the Verdi and Puccini heroines for which she is best known.
Il trovatore, Opera Hong Kong’s second production of the year so far, opened with a star-studded cast featuring soprano Martina Serafin as Leonora, tenor Marco Berti as the troubadour Manrico, baritone Simone Piazzola as the villainous Conte di Luna and mezzo-soprano Marianne Cornetti as Azucena, all performing in a simple yet elegant revolving set.
While perhaps not immediately obvious, the appeal of George Frideric Handel’s Giulio Cesare as an Academy production becomes clear once the production is underway.
Opera Hong Kong’s La bohème was originally scheduled for last May, but was bumped off the schedule by the tail-end of a Covid surge. The delayed production was well worth waiting for.
Cold and rainy England and Scotland exerted what now seems a surprisingly strong pull on Italian opera composers of the first part of the 19th century. Gaetano Donizetti alone had a string of four operas about the Tudors, starting with Elisabetta al castello di Kenilworth and quickly followed by Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda and finally Roberto Devereux.