Criticultura em Portugal

 On my recent trip to NYC I caught a performance of Florencia en el Amazonas , a 1996 opera by Mexican composer Daniel Catán. This was the first Mexican opera performed at the Met, and was part of an admirable effort to go beyond the standard repertory (eg the recent Fire Shut Up My Bones  and The History of Malcolm X ). But they have to do better than this tepid rehash of Puccini. This composer clearly loves the postromantic style of the Italian, but lacks his gift for transcendent melody. So the opera came across as overly sweetened weak tea, as a  La Boheme  clone with mosquitos.  The opera focuses on Florencia Grimaldi, a soprano diva traveling up the Amazon river on the way to an operatic engagement at the opera house at Manaus, Brazil. On the way, Florencia (well sung by the soprano Ailyn Pérez) swoons and pines over he lost love, the butterfly hunter Cristóbal, who has vanished into the Amazon forest. From the first bars, it sounds like a B- version of...

I recently enjoyed two recent concerts by Lisbon-area chamber orchestras, i.e. the Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa (OML) and the Orquestra de Câmara de Cascais e Oeiras (OCCO). The repertoire of these concerts roughly spanned Beethoven’s lifespan, (the classical to early romantic eras), and provided an entertaining overview of how classical music developed between 1770 and 1830. OML’s concert in the large concert hall in Belém began with two early Classical works of Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805). The 26 th symphony (1788) was a peppy Italianate piece without much depth. His ninth cello concerto (ca 1770) showcased the excellent young Austrian cellist Julia Hagen. Boccherini was a cello virtuoso who expanded cello technique, especially extending the instrument’s range to very high notes, often in the range of the violin. This concerto featured that extended technique. It’s a bit old-fashioned compared to the contemporaneous mature concerti of Mozart, since the cello played exclusive...