Rodolfo, Marcello, Schaunard and Colline are astronauts on a doomed space ship. The engines are inoperative. Supplies of water and oxygen are running low. In the face of death, they start hallucinating, recalling their carefree but impoverished youth in Paris many years before. This is the situation in Claus Guth’s Read More …
Salle Pleyel is an Art Deco concert hall that was originally built in 1927 by the Pleyel piano company. For decades it was a leading classical music venue in Paris, even though the acoustics and appearance of the building suffered from a series of botched renovation projects over the years. Read More …
At the back end of the ground floor of the Musée d’Orsay, I was surprised to find an exhibit on the construction of the then-new 19th century opera house which was commissioned by the Emperor Napoleon III and designed by the young architect Charles Garnier (1825-1898). The model in my Read More …
On my last evening in Paris in June 2006 I was walking to the Opéra Bastille, feeling somewhat sorry for myself because I had already turned in my bicycle to the rental place, and would have to leave Paris the next morning. I was walking through the Place des Vosges, Read More …
The amazing thing about my visit to Paris in June 2006 was that in ten days I saw eight operas at seven different venues. As I wrote at the time, “I don’t know of any other city in the world where this would be possible.” The operas I saw on Read More …
In terms of the number of seats that they can actually put on sale for any given evening, around 1,750, this is only the third largest opera house in Paris (assuming you still count the Châtelet as an opera house). But when you consider the amount of high-quality space that Read More …
Donizetti’s Don Pasquale is a funny opera that is full of lovely music and also serves as a timely reminder to all us older men that we shouldn’t get any stupid ideas about marrying women who are half a century younger than we are. It’s just not a good idea, Read More …
In 1875 Bizet’s Carmen had its world premiere here at the Opéra-Comique. Also Debussy’s Pelleas et Mélisande and Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann had their world premieres here, so this is a hall that is full of great opera history. The performance I saw here in 2006 was of The Barber Read More …
This historic theater, the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet, was built in the 1890s and has been a subsidized public theater since 1982. It has a small orchestra pit for musical productions, and is also used for spoken drama and concerts. La Carmencita, which I saw there in 2006, is an adapted Read More …
The Place du Châtelet on the right bank of the Seine is unique in that it is flanked by two large and (from a distance) identical-looking theaters, both of which belong to the city of Paris. The one on the left is the Théâtre du Châtelet, which in 2006 was Read More …