Criticultura em Portugal

 A benefit of living in Europe is being able to duck in on a variety of big musical events when I go sightseeing. In the past couple months two such experiences proved particularly memorable.  In London I saw Swan Lake at the Royal Ballet in Covent Garden. As one would expect from this august company, the solo and corps dancing was superb and expressive. The sets were a bit musty and dowdy-appearing, even though designed during this century. The true star, though, was Tchaikovsky's dazzling ballet score. If Mozart was at heart a great opera composer, Tchaikovsky was at the core a top dance composer. It's in his ballet scores, esp. Swan Lake and  Nutcracker, that we can best hear his varied orchestration and relentless forward motion and pulse, essential in the dance. In this Swan Lake  the two principal soloists, Fumi Kaneko as Odette/Odile and Vadim Muntagirov as Prince Siegfried, acted and danced beautifully. They even made the confusing ending of the ballet work. ...

The highlight of my Marvão Festival weekend was the semi-staged version (acting, minimal sets) of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio , an overall musical and dramatic delight. I've always found Mozart to be a compelling opera composer, especially when his works are performed with lightness of touch and a bit of vulgar wackiness. He perhaps used humor to reveal human emotion and behavior better than any composer. This opera, composed in 1782 when Mozart was 26, is a lot of fun. The plot is more lucid than many from this era, involving the efforts of two young men to abduct their girlfriends who have been captured by the Turks and then imprisoned in the Pasha's seraglio (harem). The Turks were always on the minds of the Viennese, especially since the 1529 Siege of Vienna, in which the Viennese repulsed the Turks' efforts to capture the city (and western Europe). The siege remains as a prominent bit of European history, as you can see in museums throughout Austria and so...