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.
Since its founding in 2007, Rhymes with Opera has emerged as a leading voice in the performing and commissioning of contemporary opera. In their recent double bill at the 124 Bank St Theater the company premiered two powerful, urgent new works which made a compelling case for the enduring relevance of opera in the 21st century. Read more »
Over the past 50 years, the countertenor voice has acquired a certain mystique. As our modern-day approximation of the castrato, its timbre has come to evoke a kind of other-worldly distance, a long-lost past recovered. Through its role in the early music revival and the historically-informed performance movement, it has garnered associations of purity and precision – all laser-tuned straight tones and clean-cut coloratura. Read more »
parterre box, “the most essential blog in opera” (New York Times), is now booking advertising for summer 2019. Email us at advertising@parterre.com and be sure to ask about our deep not-for-profit discounts!
Representing the end of the world is a challenge for any opera company, especially when said apocalypse comes as the culmination of eighteen hours of Norse epic. Yet, at the Metropolitan Opera’s Götterdämmerung on Saturday afternoon, the fires which consumed the Gods burned lukewarm, bringing the cycle to an anticlimactic conclusion. Read more »
Stefan Vinke’s Siegfried was not so much brawny and terrestrial, but heady and mercurial
The finals on Sunday seemed a bit like the modern-day operatic equivalent of the Roman colosseum.
At the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday night, Mozart’s opera never sounded fresher, a superstar cast shining new light on one of the composer’s all-too-seldom-performed scores.
Austin McCormack‘s lascivious choreography outshone a tepid and tedious staging of Saint-Saëns’s old-testament epic.
Hearing Lucas Meachem perform Kindertotenlieder in the crypt of Harlem’s Church of the Intercession was a heart-warming, and ultimately uplifting experience.
Cher Public