One trend of summer 2017 must be Brooklyn does baroque! Following LoftOpera’s muddled Stabat Mater of Pergolesi, Wednesday brought Christopher Alden’s grimly dark and violent take on Handel’s Aci, Galatea e Polifemo at National Sawdust. Neither of these works was written to be staged but the latter production worked infinitely better both dramatically and musically. Read more »
Highlights of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2019-2020 season will include the company premiere of Glass’s Akhnaten featuring Anthony Roth Costanzo and first local Turandot of Anna Netrebko (not pictured), according the always intriguing Met Future Wiki. Read more »
Sometimes, as with last week’s upending election, history seems to jump to an entirely different, unimagined timeline. The individuals who cause these disruptive changes have been a fascination for Philip Glass, whose first three operas form the so-called “Portrait Trilogy” about visionaries who transformed their respective eras. Read more »
Philip Glass is indisputably one of the most prolific composers of the last half century, yet none of his more than 20 operas has found a place in the standard repertoire.
What is an Orphic moment? A song so sweet that even Hades must release the dead back to the living?
St. Paul’s Chapel is the perfect site for Saul, Handel’s finest dramatic oratorio.
Christopher Alden‘s production of Handel’s Partenope is so erudite and theatrically audacious and also such a rollicking ride, it’s hard to believe it isn’t crap.
Saturday afternoon at 12:30 on WQXR’s magazine show Operavore, our own JJ talks about Mathilde Marchesi and Antony Roth Costanzo discusses his Orlofsky role in the Met’s Fledermaus.
Those dear, dear people over The Greene Space at WQXR would like you, cher public, to join them this Friday for a concert saluting this year’s winner of the Richard Tucker Award, mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard.
La Cieca predicts you won’t be seeing any puritans at the Met next season, except of course for the ones who slouch around during intermission hissing, “You call that a trill?”