Review | Castellucci’s Transcendent Saint François d’Assise in Salzburg
If not every hour I spent in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus this year felt entirely worthwhile, every minute of Olivier Messiaen’s four-and-a-half-hour Saint François d’Assise in…
Denise Wendel-Poray
Denise Wendel-Poray
Denise Wendel-Poray is a Canadian/ French writer, editor and curator holding degrees from the universities of Yale and McGill. Formerly an opera singer, she is author of books and essays on the relationship between art, theater and music. (Painting the Stage, Skira Editore 2019; The Last Days of the Opera, Skira Editore 2023)
From this author
Review | Rienzi: Wagner’s Illegitimate Opera Premieres at Bayreuth
This is a year full of questions at Bayreuth. To mark the Festival’s 150th anniversary, we were given the experiment—apparently a one-off—of an AI-generated Ring.…
Review | The Death of the Director: Bayreuth’s 150th Festival AI Ring
At the end of Bayreuth’s new Ring, one question remains more urgent than any discussion of how to rate the production: who, exactly, is the…
Review | Not a Ghost Ship: Tcherniakov’s Der fliegende Holländer at Bayreuth
After two evenings of Bayreuth’s much-discussed new Ring—a production conceived around artificial intelligence and credited to a curator or “technical conceptor” rather than a theatre…
Review | Markus Hinterhäuser’s Carmen in Salzburg
There are few opening nights in the cultural calendar that rival Salzburg’s. Long before the orchestra tunes, the Grosses Festspielhaus becomes the stage for another…
Review | Dudamel’s Song-Inspired Mahler Resurrection at Salzburg
Each summer the Salzburg Festival begins not with opera, but with contemplation. Before the official opening—with this year’s new production of Carmen still to come—the…
Review | Accabadora: Psychological Verismo at Aix
The burden of choice runs through this year’s Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. From the moral trials of Die Zauberflöte to Die Frau ohne Schatten, where happiness can…
Review | Mäkelä Returns to Aix with Die Frau ohne Schatten
Festival d’Aix-en-Provence could hardly have chosen two more fascinating companion pieces than Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten. Fairy tales, philosophical…
Review | Cogitore’s Magic Flute: Witnesses to History in Aix
Opening this year’s Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in the courtyard of the Théâtre de l’Archevêché on July 2, Clément Cogitore’s new production of Die Zauberflöte confronts one…
Review | William Kentridge’s L’Orfeo at Glyndebourne
Often regarded as the first great opera, this much-awaited production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo brings South African artist William Kentridge back to his own beginnings in…
