Dan Johnson
Dan Johnson was born in the desert and learned to play the fiddle. Now he lives in Brooklyn, working as a freelance writer and music communications specialist and helping to throw some of the city's most notorious underground parties.
The 20th anniversary revival of Richard Foreman and Michael Gordon‘s What to Wear at the PROTOTYPE Festival showcases a fabulous ensemble.
A Baroque Valentine’s with Opera Lafayette | Feb | DC & NYC
Celebrate love in all its guises with tender ballads, amorous duets, cheeky verses, and bawdy drinking songs plus food, cocktails and wine.
Dan Johnson on the unique voice of Hildegard composer Sarah Kirkland Snider — and why some music could only ever be written by a woman.
Dan Johnson gives an inside look at the creation of Sarah Kirkland Snider‘s rapturous new opera Hildegard which opens at New York’s PROTOTYPE Festival next week.
“This isn’t an opera that touches on queer themes; it’s a bundle of queer themes tied up in an opera.”
Surely you agree that piano concerti are inherently political.
Music for New Bodies at Lincoln Center’s Running AMOC* Festival proves Matthew Aucoin really is everything he’s made out to be
This evening of Julius Eastman at Lincoln Center was so good it hurt
The Comet/Poppea at this summer’s Running AMOC* festival at Lincoln Center is a thrilling, startling, deeply moving experience
An impressive cast blurs binaries as John Adams‘s ambitious Antony and Cleopatra arrives at the Met
An uneven new cast can’t dim the glow of Richard Eyre‘s incisive Le nozze di Figaro at the Met
The Met Orchestra Chamber Ensemble’s Das Lied von der Erde skirts the sublime at Carnegie Hall
The Jupiter Ensemble with Lea Desandre and Anthony Roth Costanzo offers sleek and sexy HIP inaugurates the Frick Collection’s new Stephen A. Schwartzman Auditorium
Look, for one of the most-staged operas in the repertoire, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte seems awfully difficult to stage.
Christopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleischmann‘s opera at the Prototype Festival re-sets Rashomon in the Pacific Northwest and binds its characters into a hellish cycle of violence with a dark, hypnotic score
Eat the Document, which premiered at the Prototype Festival last week, compresses a decades-long, nonlinear story into a swift 90 minutes while still finding time to pause for reflection.
Here’s the bottom line: at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall stage on December 3, Iestyn Davies and viol consort Fretwork made the sweetest sounds I’ve heard from human beings all year.
War! Heroism! Mysterious strangers! Attempted suicide! Steadfast love! Così fan tutte, as staged November 18-21 at Juilliard Opera, had… none of these things.
The music was at every point dramatically compelling, without seeming cheap or manipulative.
The aesthetic vision of M. Lamar’s Funeral Doom Spiritual was undeniable.
anatomy theater, receiving its New York premiere Saturday night at this year’s Prototype Festival, is a conceptual exercise in which nothing, absolutely nothing is left to the imagination.
Breaking the Waves is not only a “real opera,” it is an immensely powerful work of music drama.
Is there anything more essentially operatic than the suffering of women?
I was led through a small labyrinth of white curtains, sheer like veils, to a row of seven chairs jutting in between the stage risers.
Wednesday afternoon, Pocket Orchestra New York’s new PONYmobile presented a guerrilla performance of sorts in a most unlikely space, the XES Lounge in Manhattan, where designer Joel Yapching‘s BOOK homme debuted its Spring/Summer 2012 collection to the strains of Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in patria.
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
