“Juan Diego Flórez made an untraditional Nemorino, his small but diamond-bright tenor unlike the luscious lyric voice usually heard in this part. But he made the role his own, stopping the show when he rocketed up to a high C in his Act 2 duet with his rival, the hunky soldier Belcore. Later, he spun out the bittersweet aria ‘Una furtiva lagrima’… in a slow, dreamy tempo like a sigh of bliss.” [New York Post]
“In a season of high-profile duds like Don Giovanni and the Ring, the Met has found a winner in a dark horse, Mussorgsky’s moody Khovanshchina.” Our Own JJ (not pictured) likes something for a change in the New York Post. (Photo: Ken Howard)
“With Anjelica Huston, Parker Posey and Yoko Ono dotting the crowd at BAM Sunday afternoon, the New York City Opera’s premiere of Prima Donna offered more diva presence offstage than on.” [New York Post]
“No tenors, no arias, no orchestra pit, no plot. Can You, My Mother really be called an opera?”
Our Own JJ gets into the traditional holiday mood, journalist style, by cobbling together a listicle of last-minute shopping options. [New York Post]
“In an unlikely venue—a converted gymnasium off Avenue B—one of New York’s newest opera companies is keeping musical tradition alive.” [New York Post]
“An atomic explosion kicked off the last act of Gounod’s Faust Tuesday at the Met, but the production as a whole was more dud than bomb.” [New York Post]
“Now that it has become apparent that Robert Lepage‘s production of the Ring at the Met is a fiasco (too soon? Nah.)… well, anyway, since arguably the production is a dreary, unworkable, overpriced mess whose primary (perhaps only) virtue is that it actually hasn’t killed anyone yet, and since, let’s face it, the Machinecentric show turned out to be so mind-bogglingly expensive (all those Sunday tech rehearsals with stagehands being paid, no doubt, in solid platinum ingots!), something has to be done. In this article, I intend to propose that ‘something’.” Our Own JJ gets prescriptive at Musical America. (Image based on photos by Ken Howard)
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