Joel Rozen
Joel Rozen is a culture critic, anthropologist, and audiophile living in New York. His doctoral thesis at Princeton—still underway—is based on some field research he did in North Africa a few years ago; since then he’s enjoyed teaching in the city and writing about music. His love of opera can probably be traced back to high school, when he used to poach from his girlfriend’s dad’s CD collection. The orientation has changed and so has the digital format. What hasn’t is the Domingo/Studer Otello, which remains awesome, and unreturned.
Mariachi bands travel the world, make appearances in Hollywood, and moonlight on Linda Ronstadt albums.
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.
Jerold Offerman had spent the day readying the Algonquin Opera orchestra for a high-profile, high-stakes revival of Lucia, and things weren’t going well with the glass harmonica.
Touting an austere, governessy program—the hour-and-change Schubert/Müller cycle, Die schöne Müllerin—Jonas Kaufman fulfilled his long-awaited, high-profile return to Carnegie Hall last night.
The guy in the green plaid shirt motioned Evan over within seconds of spotting him at Aura. Evan rolled his eyes, checked his abs, and sidled up to the bar.
Weekends at Aura Bar on 53rd and Ninth are typically big money makers for the morons who run the place. Jonjon and Yoni.
I had a panic attack, that’s how moved you made me.
Last week, a pair of terrific recitals demonstrated what kind of intimate spell a dramatic singer can cast when left alone with a piano.
Whatever its flaws, La finta giardinera is indeed a wise rep choice for grad students eager to cut their teeth.
Flashes of excitement and genuine pathos lit up City Opera’s production of Dolores Claiborne!
I fucking love Renée Fleming.
Matthew Aucoin’s Crossing depicts Walt Whitman’s experience serving wounded soldiers in a DC infirmary and chronicles the period’s tragic effects.
This black-box recital was an aggressively Gallic affair
For those who thought opera to be a rare enough commodity that there shouldn’t be duels, Saturday night in the Berkshires offered the odd rebuttal.
Tack on a little symphonic Beethoven and some particularly zany hosting patter from Bernadette Peters, and you start to lose focus, or at least some sense of, um, what matters mostly.
Skirting the leafy, patrician Berkshires of Western Mass, and flush with wine coolers and white people, pastoral Tanglewood doesn’t much resemble the dark Nibelung settings of Norse myth.
Gone are the halcyon days of tradition and ritual.
If Darius Milhaud took a risk in adapting La Mère Coupable as an opera, it wasn’t the quirky, atonal style he used for his score.
So, um, I guess we can agree that words are more important than music?
I reckon marketing a sex-themed opera in Brooklyn should be like selling bacon-flavored froyo in Vermont.
From up close, the miked opera singer can be a bit tough to take.
Angels in America reimagined as an actual, full-blown opera.
Cio-Cio and Carmen: what do you do with two tragic heroines who typify not just the sexist clichés, but also the soupy exotic fixations, of the Old-World West?
