David Bonetti
Bio:
David covers fine arts and opera. He was a staff writer for the Saint Louis Post Dispatch and before that the San Francisco Examiner and Boston Phoenix. Now retired he has returned to Boston
Recent Articles:
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The Flying Dutchman at Boston Lyric Opera Music
Closes Season With American Premiere of 1841 Critical Edition
By: - May 07th, 2013The Boston Lyric Opera assembled a sterling company of singers adept at Wagnerian style while music director David Angus conducted a white-hot orchestra. Its presentation of Richard Wagner’s early work, “The Flying Dutchman,†his first mature success, to commemorate the bicentennial of the composer’s birth, was not only one of the largest productions in its history, but it was the U.S. premiere of a newly prepared critical edition of the work.
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B.U.'s Opera Institute Does Mozart Music
Final Work Combines Great Music with a Weak Story
By: - Apr 23rd, 2013Always broke, Mozart accepted a commission for an opera for the coronation of Leopold II that gave him only 18 days to write it. Although Mozart couldn't write a bad note if he tried, the results are not among his most enduring.
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New England Conservatory Revives Rossini Music
La Gazzetta No Masterpiece But Lots of Fun
By: - Apr 10th, 2013Don Pomponio takes out a personal ad in the local rag to find a husband for his daughter Lisetta. Mistaken identities ensure confusion, which leads to hilarity. In the end two young lovers find their mates, but not before Quakers and Turks make their appearance.
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A Wagner Miscellany at the BSO Music
Orchestra Commemorates Bicentennial
By: - Mar 25th, 2013The BSO has entrusted Italian maestro Daniele Gatti to conduct programs devoted to Wagner and Verdi during their bicentennial years. Gatti reveals himself to be a fine-tuner of a conductor, interested in the smallest elements of the work. The result can be impressive but a little cold.
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Boston Lyric Opera' s Clemency Music
No Mercy for James MacMillan's New Work
By: - Feb 07th, 2013In a seriously mistaken co-commision, Boston Lyric Opera, presents a parable about Abraham and Sarah by the Scottish composer James MacMillan that suggests that suicide killing is okay, if the victims are sinners.
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Renee Fleming and Susan Graham Sing French Songs Music
Two Reigning Divas Reduce Symphony Hall To Their Personal Salon,
By: - Feb 04th, 2013In a program of French salon music, Renée Fleming and Susan Graham give the vocal recital a shot of adrenalin. Both Fleming and Graham are endowed with big warm voices, creamy or buttery or honeyed - whatever comparison you prefer. They sing together like a hand in a glove, their voices intertwining so that you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
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Handel and Haydn Society's Purcell Music
A Weird but Entertaining Evening
By: - Jan 28th, 2013Purcell's "The Indian Queen" is merely the incidental music to a preposterous play by John Dryden, but it delivers a number of musical pleasures. Dryden’s play is based on total ignorance of the history of what later became Latin America. Pre-Columbian Mexico is at war with Peru, and Montezuma, historically the king of the Aztecs, is presented as the leader of the Peruvian forces who goes over to the Mexican side because his marriage proposal for the Peruvian princess he loves is rejected.
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BSO Does Hair-raising Verdi Requiem Music
A Requiem for the End of Time in Bicentennial Year
By: - Jan 21st, 2013Daniel Gatti led the enormous orchestra and chorus and four vocal soloists in Verdi's sole attempt at large-scale sacred music . Ferocious, uncompromising, Verdi’s Requiem is a Requiem for the End of the World. Maybe we can appreciate it now more than when it was written – we have witnessed several worlds end in our time and daily contemplate the imminent end of the planet.
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Monteverdi's Orfeo at Boston Early Music Festival Music
Timeless Moral: Don't Look Back
By: - Nov 26th, 2012Aaron Sheehan in the role of a lifetime as Orfeo, in the oldest work in the opera repertory. Boston Early Music Festival cast shines with youthful commitment. Although Orfeo was his first opera, Monteverdi had an innate sense of drama. He chose a simply dramatic story to set, and his music in its variety of form and mood, added to the drama.
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Michael Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage Music
Conrad Susa's Transformations
By: - Nov 18th, 2012Two midcentury operas played on Boston stages with mixed results. Tippett's early opera brought down by his ponderous text. The text-centered Susa/Sexton collaboration downplays the terror at the heart of her poetry.
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Boston Lyric Opera's Flawless Madama Butterfly Music
Yunah Lee Soars as Butterfly
By: - Nov 09th, 2012Over the past five years "Madama Butterfly" is the seventh most produced opera internationally. Many opera goers have had enough. But there are never enough Butterflys of the quality of the BLO's production. What’s extraordinary about Lee’s performance is not so much the singing, although that is all you could wish for, but her acting at the micro-level. Every movement, every gesture is not hers, but Butterfly’s.
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Charles Dutoit Conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra Music
Stravinsky's Le Rossignol and L’Enfant et les sortileges of Ravel
By: - Oct 29th, 2012With its French and Russian traditions, the BSO seemed the ideal orchestra to present these two rarities. But the Stravinsky had never been done before, and the Ravel only 3 times. Both works are oddities within the composers’ oeuvre, but that makes them even more of a delight to encounter.
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Handel Rarity Partenope by Boston Baroque Music
Amanda Forsythe and Owen Willetts Shine as Vocal Soloists
By: - Oct 21st, 2012Partenope is the Queen of Naples in this comic romp by George Frideric Handel. Playing the queen like a reality series star, Amanda Forsythe leads cast in comic and vocal bravura. It’s hard to believe but as recently as 25 years ago the Italian-language operas of George Frideric Handel were rarely heard, while his English-language oratorios were a mainstay in Anglo-Saxon countries.
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B.U. Fringe Festival Presents Massenet Rarity Music
Explores Theme of The Ladies of the Camellias
By: - Oct 08th, 2012Risk-taking annual Fringe Festival goes beyond normal student production formula. Three-part festival looks at tragic role of the courtesan in 19th century art, focusing here on Manon Lescaut and Marguerite Gautier in works by Massenet, Dumas and Verdi. The theme is “The Ladies of the Camellias,†and it attempts to probe how 19th century French and Italian playwrights and composers dealt with the role of the fallen woman.
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BSO Porgy and Bess Music
Concert Version Conducted by Bramwell Tovey
By: - Sep 29th, 2012The BSO's performance of George Gershwin's classic American "folk opera" was sumptuously played and well sung, but it tried to make Gershwin a late Romantic like Strauss or Puccini. The production is musically rich, bringing out the complexities of the score with a clarity that only underscores how great the work is. It is the first time the orchestra has performed “Porgy,†which opened in Boston in 1935 as a try-out for its New York premiere, in Symphony Hall.
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Don Pasquale a Hit for Boston Midsummer Opera Music
Austere Production Quenches Boston's Classical Music Drought
By: - Jul 29th, 2012Donizetti was a master of opera buffa - comic opera - and "Don Pasquale" is one of his enduring hits. By focusing on singers and their interactions, Boston Midsummer Opera gets it right.
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Morgenstern and Baxter at Anthony Greaney Gallery Theatre
Queer Performance Moves Critic to Tears
By: - Jul 20th, 2012I don’t think I’ve ever cried during a piece of performance art, however. That changed during the July First Friday openings on Thayer Street when recent MFA Museum School grads Hayley Morgenstern and Creighton Baxter performed their graduate thesis piece “It Might Get Better†at the Anthony Greaney Gallery. I hadn’t seen such coruscating queer performance art since I left San Francisco in 2003.
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Boston Baroque Presents Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice Music
Lean Production Brings Out Opera's Beauties
By: - May 08th, 2012Gluck attempted to strip baroque opera of its excesses. His major effort, based on the Orpheus myth, remains a singular work today. Is Gluck’s classic “reform†opera the most perfect work in the operatic repertory?
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Boston Lyric Opera's The Inspector Music
John Musto Sets Action in Mussolini-era Sicily
By: - Apr 22nd, 2012The audience laughed throughout and I laughed a few times as well, but tame comedy could have been more if composer had taken more risks. “The Inspector,†given here for the first time since its creative team tweaked it after its 2011 premiere at the Wolf Trap Opera in Virginia, is an amusing comedy in the Italian opera buffa tradition.
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Boston Lyric Opera's Barber of Seville Music
Rossini's Masterpiece Finds Human Truths
By: - Mar 16th, 2012Cast, led by Sarah Coburn's Rosina, is uniformly excellent. Production, with borrowed elements, pulled together in the vigorous direction of choreographer Doug Varone
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The Lighthouse by Peter Maxwell Davies Music
Boston Lyric's Annex Production at the JFK Library
By: - Feb 12th, 2012Three light-house keepers off the coast of Scotland disappear without a trace. Did they succumb to "The Cry of the Beast" or did they just go mad?
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Pieranna Cavalchini Lets Artists Think, Explore at the Gardner Fine Arts
The Gift of Time
By: - Jan 22nd, 2012The Artist-in-Residency Program at the Gardner Museum is 20 years old. Now, with a dedicated gallery and two resident apartments, it is poised to take on a higher profile. Curator Pieranna Cavalchini talks about the program.
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Orpheus Doesn't Look Back Music
Boston Early Music Festival Presents French Rarity
By: - Nov 28th, 2011Marc-Antoine Charpentier wrote an adaptation of the Orpheus myth, but the third act is missing. The BEMF's Gilbert Blin shot-gun weds it to another work, and the result is delightful.
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Boston Lyric Updates Macbeth Music
Production Set in a Timeless Nowhere/ Everywhere
By: - Nov 07th, 2011This "Macbeth" is visually and dramatically commanding, but the soloists, with one exception, are not stellar. Blessed with the work's two great numbers, Lady Macbeth dominates the action, but in his single aria the exiled Macduff steals the show.
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Opera Boston's Beatrice et Benedict by Berlioz Music
A Scintillating Production Restores Faith
By: - Oct 28th, 2011Beautiful sets and costumes and a young and vibrant cast who sang Berlioz's enchanting music with real verve combine to create a real hit. Beatrice et Benedict, an opera-comique with spoken dialogue as well as sung arias, ensembles and choruses, was Berlioz’s last work, and you get the feeling that he was tired of the battles he had waged as a young man against the establishment to create a new, modern and identifiably French music.
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