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NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA (Deborah Drattell) Los Angeles 2003 Placido Domingo, Rodney Gilfry, Nancy Gustafson
Popular Singers in this Opera Recording
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Nicholas and Alexandra
- Composer: Drattell Deborah
- Libretto: Nicholas von Hoffman Libretto Text, Libretto Index
- Venue & Opera Company: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles Opera, California
- Recorded: September 14, 2003
- Type: Staged Opera Live
- Singers: Placido Domingo, Rodney Gilfry, Nancy Gustafson, Jessica Rivera, Jonathan Price, Vitallj Kowaljow, Suzanna Guzman
- Conductor: Mistislav Rostropovich
- Orchestra: Los Angeles Opera Orchestra and Chorus
- Chorus: Los Angeles Opera Chorus
- Stage Director: Anne Bogart
- Stage Designer: Robert Israel
- Costume Designer: Catherine Zuber
- Lighting Designer: Christopher Akerlind
Information about the Recording
- Format: Unknown
- Quality Video: 3 Audio:3
- Subtitles: nosubs
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
Nicholas and Alexandra is an opera in three acts composed by Deborah Drattell to a libretto by Nicholas von Hoffman and premiered on September 14, 2003at the Los Angeles Opera .
The plot relates the end of Tsar Nicholas II’s life .
The opera premiered on September 14, 2003, in Los Angeles under the direction of Mstislav Rostropovich with the Los Angeles Opera Orchestra and Chorus.
Who are these people — Russia’s bumbling, ineffective last ruler, the conniving pseudo-monk who holds the royal family in his thrall, the loving but put-upon empress, the plotters and sub-plotters who bring about their nation’s downfall? Nothing in Drattell’s moaning, groaning, over-embroidered score provides answers.
The composer has had the resource to provide her one superstar — tenor Placido Domingo, adventurously but wrong-headedly cast as the hypnotic Rasputin — with loud and applause-worthy vocal lines. What’s missing — fatally so — is any sense of music defining personality, character or motivation. The dense, tuneless, pseudo-high-Russian-romantic smog of a score, interlaced with solemn chanting from the chorus behind the scrim, resolving toward the end into a pretty good Bach pastiche, might just as well serve a whole other set of characters in another time and place.
quoted from Variety