Song matters
John Yohalem reviews pianist Steven Blier‘s warm, witty, and worldly autobiography, From Ear to Ear.
John Yohalem
John Yohalem's critical writings have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, American Theater, Opera News, the Seattle Weekly, Christopher Street, Opera Today, Musical America and Enchanté: The Journal for the Urbane Pagan, among other publications. He claims to have attended 628 different operatic works (not to mention forty operettas), but others who were present are not sure they spotted him. What fascinates him, besides the links between operatic event and contemporary history, is how the operatic machine works: How voice and music and the ritual experience of theater interact to produce something beyond itself. He is writing a book on Shamanic Opera-Going.
Faerie tale theatre
Zémire et Azor, André-Ernest-Modest Grétry‘s riff on “Beauty and the Beast”, gets a rare outing in the Berkshires.
Mezzo in the dark
It is a physical pleasure to hear Kate Lindsey at close quarters.
We wear the masque
A brief concert at the Frick Collection teases the multifaceted artistry of Davóne Tines
A smoking Traviata
Restrictions encourage creative staging, for which the Berkshire Opera Festival is renowned.
Shadows of a doubt
R.B. Schlather‘s shadowy production with Heartbeat Opera at the Williamstown Theatre Festival proves that Vanessa might be coming into its own at last
Thane and suffering
In the 1847 version of Macbeth, the forces of Teatro Nuovo lacked the thunderous punch this music can pack, but provided a pleasant ride
Come on, baby, and rescue me
In Smetana‘s Dalibor, a rescue opera and a nationalistic fable collide at this year’s SummerScape Festival
Up an Octavia
The operatic offerings of Boston Early Music Festival — Keiser‘s Octavia and Telemann‘s Pimpinone and Ino — are delectable discoveries
The head on the cake plate
John Yohalem reports on Catapult Opera’s satiating San Giovanni Battista
Masques et bergamasques
John Yohalem wraps up Donizetti Month at parterre box with a look back at nearly six decades of Donizetti operagoing.
Proud ladies
Karen Slack is downright magisterial in her recital African Queens.
Bridges and tunnel
John Yohalem reports on a serendipitous recital from J’Nai Bridges and Joshua Mhoon in Montclair, New Jersey
Act III at last
John Yohalem reports from the New York Dramatic Voices performance of Act III of Die Walküre
I was on your side, Bill, when you were losin’
Target Margin Theater proudly boasts that Show/Boat: A River, its small-scale and bare-bones staging of Show Boat (at the Skirball Center on Washington Square through the 26th), is a “bold reimagining” of the classic Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein show, a “new adaptation that explores America’s transformation from the Jim Crow 1880s to the Chicago of the Great Migration to the challenges of today,” but I don’t see it.
Singing from our chains
There are two problems to address – problems of the sort the arts thrive on addressing.
Milling around
On Tuesday night, in the commodious concert hall of the Morgan Library, the Boston Early Music Festival forces brought Georg Philipp Telemann’s Don Quichotte auf der Hochzeit des Comacho to New York.
The cheese stands alone
Strike Up the Band! cried the brothers Gershwin (and book-writers George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind) in the first of their three satirical, vaguely political operettas—sort of jazz Gilbert & Sullivan—that they dreamed up in the late 1920s.
Five of a kind
Rare is the revival of Il trovatore that boasts five first-rate singers, and such an occasion should be treasured. And so, at the Met last Saturday, it was.
Broken branching out
Karim Sulayman’s intentions are to demonstrate links and roots, in themes musical and poetic, crossing every boundary of culture, religion, nationality, genre.
The clown of God
Rigoletto is the perfect opera. The story is straightforward and powerful; none of the action occurs backstage or between scenes or twenty-seven years before curtain rise; and the ethical anvil lands not once but twice, on the title character singing, “La maledizione!” The curse!
The music and the mirror
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
Self-flagellation
One moral is that Eugene O’Neill may just not be opera fodder.
Take the A415 train
They used to say of the island of Crete that it produces more history than can be consumed locally.
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).
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!
