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26 May 2012
Director David Freeman tells why this is an event worth experiencing in the Olympic year. »
19 May 2012
It is not long into Act One of Mignon at Geneva’s Grand Theatre when Diana Damrau glides on stage as Philine, commands our rapt attention, and sweeps all before her. »
26 Apr 2012
Massenet’s Manon succeeds in the theater when the soprano has
a real sense of the role and how she wants to present it. »
19 Apr 2012
I have to rethink my week, because somehow I have to get to see Opera Atelier’s production of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Armide again. »
13 Apr 2012
Released in late 2011, Deutsche Grammophon’s DVD of the new staging of Berg’s Lulu at the Gran Teatro del Liceu, Barcelona is an excellent contribution to the discography of this fascinating opera. »
31 Mar 2012
The novels of Sinclair Lewis once shot across the American literary skies like comets, alarming and fascinating readers of that era, but their tails didn’t extend far behind them. »
19 Mar 2012
You can’t keep a good opera buffa down. And Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale is about as good as opera buffa gets. »
05 Mar 2012
Right to the musical ‘score’ board: Zurich Opera stared down the mighty challenge posed by Rossini’s Otello ossia il moro di Venezia, and knocked it out of the ballpark. »
20 Feb 2012
Erwin Schrott triumphed as Don Giovanni in the Mozart/da Ponte series at the Royal Opera House, overcoming the limitations of the staging.
»
03 Feb 2012
To the dismay of New York opera fans, the original Metropolitan Opera House,
located at Broadway and 39th Street, was to be torn down and replaced by a new hall
a mere 30 blocks away. »
25 Jan 2012
War and destruction is everywhere these days, not least in Pesaro where Graham Vick staged a lethal Mosé in Egitto last August, nor less so in San Francisco where baritone Thomas Hampson perished as Rick Rescorla in Heart of a Soldier last September. »
30 Dec 2011
I spoke with Vivica Genaux in December 2011, when she stopped in New York at
the end of one of her concert tours. »
19 Dec 2011
Jean-Philippe Rameau, an organist and music theoretician, was active for much of his life in musical centers distant from the cultural juggernaut of Paris. »
13 Dec 2011
Straight to the point: Netherlands Opera has mounted as luminous and emotionally engaging an Idomeneo as is imaginable. »
02 Dec 2011
At one point in The Met’s history, Faust was performed so frequently that one critic in mocking reference to Wagner’s opera house at Bayreuth coined the theater Faustophilhaus. »
25 Nov 2011
No cuts, not a single one, nearly four hours of non-stop arias, and its only hit tune happens within the first five minutes. »
15 Nov 2011
Deborah Warner’s new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is an evocative and lyrical depiction of elegiac passion. »
01 Nov 2011
It’s very unusual for the Met these days—or any major opera house, in any era—to present a glossy new production with two different stars in the leading role. »
23 Oct 2011
‘Erotic oratorio’ is the odd-sounding definition devised by modern scholars, such as Howard E. Smither, for those pious music dramas employing sex-laden plots from the Bible, the Apocrypha or the lives of Saints in order to give the audience moral instruction in a quasi-operatic, if generally unstaged, form. »
12 Oct 2011
Should I wait until the end of this review to tell you how much fun, how much of a theatrical whoopee cushion Robert Wilson’s production of Die Dreigroschenoper has been at BAM last week? »
28 Sep 2011
Bad news travels fast. Though you are about to read another version of how American diva Renée Fleming failed to bring Lucrezia Borgia alive, let us begin by discussing a few other things you already know. »
21 Sep 2011
What do a ferociously violent melodrama, an ecstatic spiritual revelation and an ironic black farce have in common? »
06 Sep 2011
Bochum’s Jahrhunderthalle, a massive, re-purposed industrial building, seemed an unlikely location to contain and frame the transcendent, unbounded spiritual journey of Wagner’s masterpiece Tristan und Isolde. »
06 Sep 2011
Superstitions surround theatrical productions of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy. »
27 Aug 2011
Musical excellence was the centerpiece of three of Santa Fe Opera’s annual offerings. »
20 Aug 2011
Gaetano Donizetti is arguably the established opera composer with the highest ratio of failures to successes. »
13 Aug 2011
Great characters are at the center of all operatic masterpieces, yet opera almost never treads into “operatic biography” territory. »
01 Aug 2011
An appreciation of La traviata plus La clemenza di Tito and Le Nez/The Nose at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. »
22 Jul 2011
Athalia: Oratorio (sacred drama) in 3 acts »
07 Jul 2011
By 1825, as Rossini’s operatic vein was approaching exhaustion, the
Neapolitan Saverio Mercadante ranked as a front-runner for his succession
alongside Bellini and Donizetti; much more so, however, in the field of serious
drama than in opera buffa. »
06 Jul 2011
Some of the experts said it was the best Ring ever, others merely
said it was one of the best (these were lecturers at a Wagner Society
symposium). »
22 Jun 2011
Will Crutchfield made his name as a writer and musicologist in the mid-1980s, becoming the youngest music critic in the history of The New York Times. »
06 Jun 2011
The U.S. premiere of Hans Werner Henze’s Phaedra at the Opera Company of Philadelphia may well be the most important and ambitious new work presented by any American company this season. »
22 May 2011
Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska certainly knows how to make the most
of every opportunity. »
18 May 2011
Gluck’s Orfeo is, intentionally, free of clutter. If you cut
out the scenes of balletic rejoicing just before the finale (and I can’t
think of any good reason not to do so), it’s less than ninety minutes of
music. »
29 Apr 2011
For the second time in a matter of just a few weeks, the Wigmore Hall
audience were treated to an evening of seventeenth-century song and dance. »
24 Apr 2011
It has long been my belief that the problems of the planet would be resolved
(or move on to their next stage) if only the folk of every ethnicity (nation,
faith, historic minority, tribe) would devote their energy to creating
opera—and perhaps theater or dance—out of its musical and mythical
traditions. »
14 Apr 2011
In Britain, Katarina Karnéus is closely associated with Grieg and Sibelius. Indeed, her career has almost been defined by her recordings of their songs for Hyperion. »
28 Mar 2011
Rossini’s penultimate stage work, Le Comte Ory, belongs to
the tradition of sexy scoundrel operas, along with such works as Don
Giovanni, Zampa, Fra Diavolo, Barbe-Bleu,
Les Brigands and Threepenny Opera. »
24 Mar 2011
Opera is alive and well in Sarasota. “It feels like it did before,” says Communications Officer for Sarasota Opera Patricia Horwell. »
15 Mar 2011
Strict courtly hierarchies and the repressed formality of ritual juxtaposed
with violent sexual jealousy and lurid erotic excess … a stage-world
more suited to the Straussian insalubrity of Salomé than to the epic
grandeur of Verdi’s Aida, perhaps? »
06 Mar 2011
Eugène Scribe and Giacomo Meyerbeer were in the business of creating
proto-cinematic spectacles of drama and music, the formula being to take a historical incident in some exotic country or era, put in a tormented love story to hold our attention, and resolve the whole in catastrophe. »
18 Feb 2011
From the sublime (Parsifal, the night before) to the not-even-ridiculous. »
07 Feb 2011
Preparing for the Met premier of Nixon in China, I resolved to
forget—or place on hold—everything I remembered, or thought I
remembered, about the real persons who are characters in this opera, »
31 Jan 2011
Elizabeth Futral has established herself as one of the major coloratura sopranos in the world today. With her stunning vocalism and vast dramatic range, she has embraced a diverse repertoire that includes Vivaldi, Handel, Mozart, Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, Verdi, Glass, and Previn. »
16 Jan 2011
They have been fiddling with Luc Bondy’s staging of Tosca. Scarpia doesn’t masturbate on the Madonna; he just sort of pinches her erotically. »
31 Dec 2010
Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy’s impressionist drama closely
based on Maeterlinck’s eerie, symbolist play, is not a terribly vocal opera; it calls more for the subtlety of art song style than the belting of great divas and divos. »
19 Dec 2010
La Fanciulla del West is Puccini’s love letter to an America that had acclaimed him joyously on his triumphant visit of 1907 to attend the Met premieres of Manon Lescaut and Madama Butterfly. »
11 Dec 2010
The opening night of the new season at Teatro alla Scala Milan is a gala event, the most glamorous in the entire Italian opera year. »
03 Dec 2010
It may be as well to put matters in context by saying that Don Carlo is a
favorite opera of mine (and of all Verdi lovers), and that I found the Met’s new staging highly satisfactory, vocally very good if less than top flight, orchestrally thrilling—and that I hope to catch it again this
season. (Interesting rumors have been heard about the alternate tenor.) »
12 Nov 2010
Lucrezia Borgia: Melodramma in a prologue and two acts. »
07 Nov 2010
Minnesota Opera’s recent production of Rossini’s La Cenerentola certainly is a fantastical, comical portrayal of the classical fairy tale. »
24 Oct 2010
The last curtain call at the opera usually goes to the title character, the star of the work just performed. At the end of the Met’s new Boris Godunov, the calls begin with a solo call for the title character, René Pape as Boris, and conclude with one for the Metropolitan Opera Chorus all by themselves. »
16 Oct 2010
Dame Joan Sutherland, ‘La Stupenda’, sang her first Gilda at Covent
Garden in 1957 under the baton of Sir Edward Downes, and sang the role many times and to great acclaim on the ROH stage. »
