Dawn Fatale
Richard Lynn is a New York City based opera lover who writes at parterre box under the name Dawn Fatale. His love of opera started at a very young age when he used to listen to the Met broadcasts and obsessively read back issues of Opera News in lieu of socializing at family gatherings. In college, he majored in Chemistry while taking as many music and theater courses as possible. He worked at the Music Library to get access to the opera recordings that were off limits to undergraduates. Since the early 1990s he has been writing about opera at parterre box and other publications and is particularly interested the evolution of staging and performance practices.
Tobias Kratzer digs beneath the surface of Strauss‘s Intermezzo in an excellent new DVD from Deutsche Oper Berlin.
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.
Juan Diego Flórez and Damiano Michieletto concoct an absinthe-fueled fever dream in a new DVD from The Royal Ballet and Opera and Opusarte.
A new recording of La fiamma from Deutsche Oper Berlin sets Respighi’s score ablaze.
Jeanine Tesori’s Blue is an ambitious and worthy opera that deserves a better presentation than it got at Lincoln Center on Saturday.
Tobias Kratzer‘s time-traveling Arabella from the Deutsche Oper Berlin, now available on DVD, turns the opera’s problems into its strengths.
A new recording of Boito‘s Nerone from Cagliari shows off an epic opera with fire and flamboyance
Jonas Kaufmann has a new lieder album called Doppelgänger, but the contents of the album vary depending on how you purchase it.
The miracle workers at Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Odyssey Opera have published another premiere recording of a work that I’ve long heard of but never heard: Dominick Argento’s The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe.
For our first review in a new series, we turn to the new recording of Dido and Aeneas featuring Joyce DiDonato, Michael Spyres and Maxim Emelyanychev leading Il Pomo d’Oro.
The moral stench seeps through Peter Gelb‘s decision to partner with the Saudi government, but what new sources of funding for the Met don’t have red flags?
Richard Lynn bravely asks what we’re hoping to get out of the continued Peter Gelb-bashing — and whether our expectations of him have ever been fair
Opera Director and Detroit Opera Artistic Director Yuval Sharon begins his recent book A New Philosophy of Opera by imagining a future – some forty to fifty years from now – in which opera ceases to exist as an art form.
The Met doesn’t have the monopoly on Salome this spring — look no further than Catapult Opera’s San Giovanni Battista which opens in Brooklyn next month.
The Metropolitan Opera chose the early August operatic doldrums in NYC to announce the renewal of Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s contract as music director through the 2029-30 season.
parterre box turns 30 on Sunday and writers from around the box are reflecting on the legacy of founder James Jorden and three decades of “remembering when opera was queer and dangerous and exciting and making it that way again”
A quick survey of the Met website shows wide swaths of available seats for the upcoming performances of La traviata and L’elisir d’amore. Only new works like The Hours and Fire Shut Up in My Bones have been achieving sold-out houses.
A nonstop flow of COVID related announcements from New York City performing arts organizations has swept the city the past weeks.
Last year at this time, performance arts organizations in NYC were announcing that the COVID pandemic would force closures through the summer. We here at parterre box, having honed our mantic powers predicting the precise timing of a singer’s vocal collapse, foresaw a grimmer reality.
What options are there for the Met and the other performing arts organizations trying to envision restarting performances in the fall?
Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America provides ample fodder for the legions of amateur opera sleuths seeking to confirm their theory of “Who Killed City Opera?”
Akhnaten, seen at the Los Angeles Opera on November 13 tells the story of the Pharaoh who abandoned traditional Egyptian polytheism.
At the election-eve Jenufa at the Met, Trumpism made an unexpected, if timely appearance.
The redevelopment that took place at Lincoln Center during Reynold Levy’s tenure as president of Lincoln Center represents a considerable accomplishment.
James Levine turns 72 this year. Even though his health has improved considerably in the past year and he may continue to conduct for a decade or more, it seems inevitable that he will step down as the Met’s Music Director sometime in the next few years to assume the role of Conductor Laureate.
