Sunday saw the maiden production of Giorgio Lalov's Baltimore Opera Theater, which presented "Barber of Seville" at the Hippodrome. According to Tim Smith's review in the Baltimore Sun, not all of the questions about this company and its concept (as reported here earlier) have been satisfactorily answered; but, he observes, things might improve by their "Rigoletto" in March. (Some of the other opera events scheduled in Baltimore in the coming months, including a recital by Renée Fleming, are listed at baltimoreopera.com.)

Just in time for the holidays, the new updated editions of two standard guides to classical recordings have come thunking across my desk (displacing several tottering stacks of CDs in the process). Neither the Gramophone Classical Music Guide 2010 nor the Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music 2010 is exactly a slim tome. In comparing the two, I am sorely tempted to indulge in the kind of equivocation, praising the strengths of each, in which both volumes specialize: sometimes, reading through the list of recordings, it's hard to figure out exactly which ones are being recommended and why. The main impression you get is that there's a lot of good music out there.
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Charles Castronovo, John Relyea, and Antony Walker in WCO's "Faust." (Don Lassell)

Web-only review:

A "Faust" dominated by its devil
by Joe Banno

If you can't perform Gounod's "Faust" with full sets and costumes and hellish special effects, it's a good idea to put together a formidable team of singers who can make the audience forget the theatrical eye-candy. Conductor Antony Walker assembled a young and stylish cast for Sunday's non-staged Washington Concert Opera performance at Lisner Auditorium, and the piece -- even though sung in formal wear -- lost little of its dramatic punch.
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Web-only review:

Entremont brings Vienna's charm to Strathmore
by Cecelia Porter

Think Vienna, think music. The Vienna Chamber Orchestra came to Strathmore on Sunday, bringing some of the glistening sound and music of that illustrious city to Bethesda. The group was established immediately after World War II as part of a musical resurgence amid an Austria in ruins. A distinguished pianist, the French conductor Philippe Entremont, now 75, led the musicians in Mozart's "Haffner" Symphony No. 35, K. 385; his Piano Concerto No. 20, K. 466 (with Entremont as soloist), and Haydn's "London" Symphony, No. 104; this year marks the bicentennial of Haydn's death.
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In today's Washington Post: Sonata cycle an accomplishment, by Anne Midgette.

In today's Washington Post:

Leif Ove Andsnes's "Pictures Reframed," by Anne Midgette

Muti coaxes pleasing glow from the New York Philharmonic, by Anne Midgette

Berlioz is less than "fantastique" under Alsop's uninspired baton, by Joe Banno

The musical art of noise, from Bang on a Can and Trio Mediaeval, by Joan Reinthaler

Step aside, Borat: Kazakh players bring vibrant sound to the Kennedy Center, by Cecelia Porter

If anyone has other views about any of these concerts, or reports on other weekend concerts worth noting, please post them in the comments section. (Coverage of Sunday's concerts will follow on Tuesday.)

Just before the opening of Janacek’s “From the House of the Dead” at the Metropolitan Opera, I got a message from someone who had attended the dress rehearsal. The writer wanted to know whether this was what Peter Gelb thought we needed today.

I’m not sure what the writer of this message was taking exception to about this opera, which I saw earlier this week. I don’t see how it can be the production values of Patrice Chereau’s powerful staging (which originated at the Aix-en-Provence festival, and is available as a DVD with Pierre Boulez conducting). True, you could say that the director focused more on the mass of people on stage than on the individual characters, but I’d say this was a deliberate decision. The piece, after all, is set in a prison camp, and Chereau underlines the unalleviated bleakness and facelessness of the place, which reduces men to the merest animal instincts (grabbing up the clothes of a new prisoner as he is stripped down and inserted among them). In one early scene, the prisoners emerge from a communal bath or shower, an undifferentiated mass of naked flesh. As they clothe themselves, each body becomes distinct from the others, but not in any fundamentally significant way: here, individuation is only a surface conceit.
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In today's Washington Post: The NSO's excursions with Wolff and Bell, by Anne Midgette.

In the Washington Post (posted belatedly): Zukerman's ensemble tries to follow the leader, by Robert Battey.

I, and evidently many other people, have been enjoying following the discussion about orchestras that developed in the wake of this post about Michael Kaiser. Since the post is about to scroll off the main page, I thought I’d summarize a few of the main points that emerged: call it a Cliff's Notes version for the casual reader.
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The other week my colleague Tom Huizenga, of National Public Radio, and I had a conversation about the trends in the classical music field over the last ten years as part of an ongoing NPR series on "The Decade in Music." Our discussion has now been posted: You can read the interview, and/or hear it, on the NPR website.

In today's Washington Post: For the Choral Arts Society, what goes around finally comes around, by Cecelia Porter.

Writing about the 32 Beethoven sonatas made me remember a loose thread I never picked up from an earlier post. This summer, I cited Harold Schonberg’s books as examples of popular writing about classical music, and compared them to the kind of thing we tend to get now. I didn’t actually mean to hold Schonberg up as a paragon; I was simply trying to say that I find his books more entertaining references than many of the popular works we have today. But after finishing rereading “The Great Pianists,” I'm not sure I'd even go that far; filled with information as it is, it ultimately lost me thanks to its incessant hyperbole.
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Norman Lebrecht is hosting a discussion on his blog (and Twitter, and Facebook) about which now-living composers are most likely to be played in 50 years. The debate is intriguing though the parameters are unclear (played, for example, by whom? Orchestras are unlikely to play Steve Reich, because he hasn’t written much for orchestra). Anyway, voting is open on Lebrecht’s blog until 6 pm EST today. Have at it.

On Saturday, the Minnesota Opera revived “Casanova’s Homecoming” by Dominick Argento, a composer once at the center of American opera, now less-often performed. Everybody likes the idea; the first actual review is a little equivocal.

A postscript to the NEA Opera Honors: opera-lovers are encouraged to watch the tribute videos on the NEA’s website. Frank Corsaro, on his, makes a pithy observation about how singers with vocal problems are often actually having acting problems; it bore out something Gidon Saks said to me last week about a production in which he didn’t feel comfortable with the staging, and consequently became unable to sing well. I would guess this only applies to singers who are good enough actors to begin with that a difficult staging represents to them a violation of their own artistry.
It was also notable that Lotfi Mansouri at 80 looks better than he did in photos 20 years ago: trim and dapper and urbane. His memoirs are coming out next year from Northeastern University Press; the coauthor is Donald Arthur, who worked on the fine memoirs of Astrid Varnay and Hans Hotter. This should be a fun and juicy book, though Mansouri regretted that sections of it had to be cut because the publisher found them actionable. Bring it on.

Edited to add: I was badly negligent in failing, in the abovementioned NEA Opera Honors write-up, to mention Chris Pedro Trakas's fine performance of one of Nixon's arias from Adams's "Nixon in China." It was a first-rate piece of singing acting -- the diction so perfect you understood every word, Nixon's mannerisms even brought across -- and it deserved better from me than neglect.

A bonanza of classical music reviews in today's Washington Post:

The NEA Opera Honors celebrate a cross-section of American opera, by Anne Midgette
Lang Lang plays with the NSO, by Anne Midgette

Kiri te Kanawa in recital (not farewell), by Joan Reinthaler

The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra (scroll to the bottom of the page), by Mark J. Estren

Haochen Zhang, Cliburn winner, at Wolf Trap Barns, by Mark J. Estren

François-Frederic Guy begins his Beethoven sonata cycle (scroll to the bottom of the page), by Charles T. Downey

In today's Washington Post: An introductory user's guide to the Beethoven piano sonatas, by Anne Midgette.

Note: a reader wrote in to observe that in my roster of Beethoven sonata cycles currently going on or scheduled in the DC area, I neglected to mention one I blogged about earlier: Yuliya Gorenman's ongoing cycle at American University (the next is in April). Gorenman will also play the "Waldstein" sonata in one of Rob Kapilow's lecture-demonstrations in the series "What Makes it Great?," presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society on January 12.