Gabrielle Ferrari
Gabrielle Ferrari is a PhD student at Columbia University researching gender and sexuality in British music, twentieth-century opera, and classical music and popular culture. She has degrees in music and English literature from Southern Methodist University and her Masters in Historical Musicology from Columbia University. If she isn't watching opera, writing about an opera, or reading about an opera, she's probably singing opera. When she's feeling a little bit wild, she dabbles in oratorio and musical theater.
Like everyone reading this, I imagine, I’ve missed going to see and hear something in person more than I thought possible.
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Happy New Year, dear readers, from me, Callum, and Christine Goerke’s headband-tiara!
Jonas Kaufmann would like you know it’s Christmas. Well, not unlike a broken clock, he is right, at least for one day a year.
Grab a fuzzy robe, a hot toddy, and a Wales guidebook, then sink blissfully into your couch for Bryn Terfel’s Christmas concert for the Met’s Live in Concert Series.
Diana Damrau and Joseph Calleja presented an uneven program in a lavish setting this weekend in the most recent entry in the Met’s concert series.
Lise Davidsen turned in a fine performance Saturday, cementing her up-and-coming star status in an eclectic program given from the Oscarshall Palace in Oslo.
By a margin of more than two to one, the cher public has chosen “O Scarpia, avanti a Dio!” as the greatest of all opera curtain lines.
It’s come down to this: the two finalists in the Best Opera Curtain Line competition.
We move now to the semi-finals of the Best Opera Curtain Line competition.
And now, with your cooperation, cher public, we are about to decide which is the best opera curtain line of all opera curtain lines.
With thanks to commenter Krunoslav for the suggestion, we will kick off our new game with the theme “Best Curtain Line.”
A new series where we pit Zerbinetta against Zerlina, Caballé against Callas, Berg against Bellini in the ultimate operatic showdown.
Lady M, an Online Fantasia on Verdi’s Macbeth, Heartbeat Opera’s creative and thought-provoking foray into the Zoom opera scene, left me feeling alternately pensive, hopeful and somewhat uneasy, in a good way.
The season’s second cast delivered a satisfying, if not transcendent, La Traviata at the Met last night as they struggled to emerge from piles of jewel tone brocade and gold filigree.
Opera for families may not generally be my thing, but I loved feeling like I was a tiny part of shaping a new opera.
If only she’d been able to sing more than 10 minutes of Bjork’s music!
Do we do what we have to do? Or do we have to do what we do?
I watched Greta Gerwig’s heartbreaking, gorgeous, joy-filled explosion of an adaptation of Little Women in about the best way one can, sniffling in the dark with my best friend, the closest person I have to a sister.
I’m only now coming up for air after a night spent wading in the deep, cool, refractory waters of Magdalene, a work of immense, mythic joy and pain wrapped in the details of the ordinary.
Composer Garrett Fisher and librettist Ellen McLaughlin’s Blood Moon wears its themes on its sleeve to great success in this spellbinding new opera.
Zauberland: An Encounter with Schumann’s Dichterliebe touched on themes of forced migration, loss, exile, and dehumanization.
On Site Opera’s Turn of the Screw, an immersive production set in the Bronx’s Wave Hill Gardens, featured mostly good singing and a few directorial and technological missteps.
There were plenty of Turan-do’s and only a few Turandon’ts at the Met’s Turandot Sunday afternoon.
My blood sure boiled at this revival of the Met’s utterly punchable production of Macbeth.
