Witchery and bitchery
Double double, toil and trouble, y’all, and happy spooky season from Slaylem. (It’s like Salem, but fun.)
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.
New man river
Mixing the historical with the personal in strikingly original ways, Davóne Tines and Zack Winokur’s Robeson sent sparks out over the Hudson.
Destiny’s child
While you may need to bring along your Dramamine, the Met’s new production of La forza del destino, does—eventually—spin fast enough to achieve escape velocity.
London calling
I watched the finals for this year’s George and Nora London Foundation competition and would like to offer, if not a traditional review, a brief roundup of who I found exceptionally watchable and whom I think you, dear parterre boxers, should watch out for in the next few years.
Star vehicles
This Carmen, in other words, was somewhat less radical than its initial image suggested.
Nighthawks
Edward Hopper’s paintings from the 1930s and 1940s are simply lousy with windows.
Double take
German opera-director Claus Guth has reimagined Schwanengesang as a series of scarred soldier’s visions in Doppelgänger, showing this week in at the Park Avenue Armory.
Free Byrd
Death of Classical, under the direction of founder Andrew Ousley, is interested in enlivening the classical music genre by organizing events in Green-Wood Cemetery, usually with a focus on food and drink.
Calling all fairies!
Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, presented at Carnegie Hall this past Wednesday by MasterVoices, is a charming rom-com that pits the feminine world of nature against masculine government with unabashedly silly and utterly delightful results.
“You must change your life”
This was a wonderful concert because MIchael Tilson Thomas approached every moment of it with an air of expansiveness and gratitude.
The final strangeness
What’s the status of the American Dream nowadays? Did it ever really exist? If it’s dead, why isn’t it gone?
She dreamed a dream
Kurt Weill, Ira Gershwin, and Moss Hart’s 1941 musical Lady in the Dark is a psychoanalytical romantic comedy. It simultaneously mocks and takes seriously the power of looking inward to understand oneself, a process which can be silly, frustrating and life-changing in turn.
How stable everything appears
Plink. A marble drops into a bowl. A brief yelp from glass, and a dozen, a hundred, a thousand years pass. Eventually the bowl is full of marbles, each one a tiny globe.
Disorientation
Teatro Nuovo took a big risk in a bad way on Wednesday with its revival of Rossini’s Maometto II.
The clue whose meaning we avoid
We watch Peter Grimes being made into a deviant— a process that can take place through the mechanism of the law, but often happens outside of it through social processes.
Take the long way Rome
David McVicar’s 2017 production of Tosca returned to the Met on Tuesday night, with an able and watchable, if not transcendent cast.
So damn bored
It’s nasty world, Shostakovich seems to say, where life alternates between boring and terrifying.
A different type of self-consciousness altogether
Emily D’Angelo, in a moment of subversion, sang the entire program wearing casual trousers, a vest, and chunky combat boots, her cropped hair slightly mussed, and wearing only light make-up.
Sister tract
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is perfect figure for an opera; known, but not known enough, especially in English-speaking countries, with a life that involved plenty of love, poetry and tragedy.
Varying the song
The opera The Rake’s Progress, as many people know already, was inspired by a series of engravings and paintings of the same name by William Hogarth, showing the decline of a young man into depravity and insanity.
Reviving a pharaoh
The Met brought back 2019 smash Akhnaten last night, with nearly the exact same cast and creative team, and with nearly the same knockout effect of three years ago.
Strangeness of the body
On this past, rainy Thursday, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s delivered a really rather extraordinary performance of the St. Matthew Passion. To me, this evening was a fascinating exploration of work.
Baby got backup
Michel van der Aa’s new opera UPLOAD at the Park Avenue Armory explores the various ethical issues surrounding AI while coming back to a set of classic philosophical questions about free will, pain and the nature of the soul.
From A to Z
Has there ever been a more perfect opera to watch after a breakup than Ariadne auf Naxos?
Win a Free Ticket to Opening Night at the Met!
Quinn Kelsey and Lise Davidsen star in the Met's new Macbeth. We're giving away one ticket, so screw your courage to the sticking place and enter now!
I’ll take the fall
The days are getting shorter, but you can keep the prattle going this fall’s Talk of the Town! You will, you can, you must join in the discussion about: Great mezzo soprano performances (October),
Gained in translation (November), Teleport me back to… (December).
