Callum John Blackmore
Callum Blackmore is a writer and a researcher currently completing a PhD in historical musicology at Columbia University. Before moving to New York, Callum was awarded degrees from the University of Auckland and the University of Leeds, and has worked with opera companies in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. His research currently focuses on opera and politics in the wake of the French Revolution.
Not everyone is happy about the Beethoven sestercentennial.
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While last year’s finals were dominated by early nineteenth-century bel canto arias, this year’s finalists took on a remarkably broad range of music from a variety of repertoires.
Saturday’s performance of Così fan tutte demonstrated that even the cool, acerbic wit of Mozart’s most controversial comedy can warm our hearts in these icy winter months.
On the day of the Super Bowl, I attended a near-sold-out screening of the Paris Opéra’s recent production of Rameau’s 1735 opéra-ballet Les Indes galantes at New York’s Alliance Française.
Wednesday night’s New York Philharmonic concert was a high-stakes performance for a number of reasons.
It is rare to be moved to tears by a lieder recital. It is rarer still to be moved to tears by the third song on a recital program.
The opera’s radical vision lay in its enormous scale, which encompassed a hundred-strong community chorus taken from the ranks of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and Master Voices.
At the Metropolitan Opera on Friday night, an otherwise undistinguished Traviata was salvaged by an astonishing performance from Aleksandra Kurzak, whose Violetta was an incontrovertible triumph.
Although the gold glitter cannons detonated at the end of the act were an ostentatious reminder that this was a celebration of the new year, it seemed that the only words on anyone’s lips as the audience filed out of the theater were “Viva Netrebko!”
Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra reigned supreme at the opening night of Wozzeck on Friday evening, rendering every snarl and shimmer of Berg’s score with gripping intensity.
If Sunday’s performance of Magic Flute at the Met demonstrated one thing, it is that opera targeted at children must be just as good as (if not better than) opera targeted at adults.
A near-full house attended the Jessye Norman Memorial Celebration at the Met on Sunday afternoon, the auditorium packed with family, friends, colleagues, and fans of the late soprano, who passed away on September 30 of this year.
Saturday afternoon’s performance of Le Nozze di Figaro at the Met was awash with contradictions.
Così fan tutte presents a considerable challenge to the modern director.
Friday evening’s Met premiere of Akhnaten was a resounding triumph and an outstanding testament to Philip Glass’s enduring operatic vision.
It seems a travesty that Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, one of the seminal works of the 20th by one of America’s most iconic composers, is only just receiving its Met premiere in 2019, some 35 years after its first performance!
At Friday night’s performance of La Bohème at the Met, the cast seemed to lean into (and gamble upon) the production’s enduring popularity.
Hannah Lash’s latest opera, which premiered at the Miller Theater on Wednesday night, was a musical and dramatic misfire.
As the Netrebko-crowned Macbeth took to the stage at the Met, just a few blocks away, Teatro Grattacielo presented its 25th Anniversary Gala Concert.
At the Met’s performance of Manon Tuesday evening, Michael Fabiano made as good a case as any for renaming the opera Chevalier des Grieux.
Benjamin Yarmolinsky’s The Constitution: A Secular Oratorio, performed by Vertical Player Repertory on Thursday evening, was an awful lot of legal speak for one evening.
One of the main problems with My Undying Love was that it did not appear to know what audience it was pitching to.
David Lang’s Prisoner of the State, which was premiered on Thursday night by the New York Philharmonic, places the issue of mass incarceration front and center, foregrounding the violence of the prison system, both physical and psychological.
Daniel Thomas Davis’ The Impossible She, was a towering musical achievement, a hugely complex work packing a whopping political and intellectual punch.
