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.
John Yohalem
Joy and mental sanity reign at the end of Dinorah for Suchan Kim and Holly Flack.
Meyerbeer’s name, when remembered at all, is synonymous with folies de grandeur, a veritable Mercedes Benz (or, more likely, Hispano-Suiza) of old-fashioned operatic vehicle. Read more »
Nothing daunted by the postage-stamp-stage of Lang Recital Hall at Hunter, half of which must be ceded to the orchestra, Utopia Opera has spent most of a decade staging Gilbert & Sullivan and a great deal else (Douglas Moore, Philip Glass, Thea Musgrove) with admirable wit, invention and musicality. Read more »
Director Ivo van Hove, in collaboration with Flemish opera company Muziektheater Transparant, brings his trademark physicality and stripped-down aesthetic to bear on Leoš Janáček‘s “pathbreaking, emotionally raw song cycle” (The New York Times) Diary of One Who Disappeared. Featuring bravura performances by tenor Andrew Dickinson and mezzo-soprano Marie Hamard and additional music by composer Annelies Van Parys, BAM presents the US Premiere of this contemporary update April 4—6 at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House.
In 1917, Czech composer Janáček became obsessed with a married woman 40 years his junior. In the throes of despair, he penned more than 700 love letters and a haunting 22-part song cycle, about a village boy who falls in love with a Romany girl. Van Hove’s contemporary reimagining of Janáček’s Diary of One Who Disappeared paints a deeply affecting portrait of identity, infatuation, and ultimately, alienation. Read more »
To put the matter succinctly: I missed Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole when New York City Opera presented it at BAM five years ago. Wednesday night, at the opening of the Scottish Opera’s 2017 production of Turnage’s previous opera, Greek, at the same place, I was very sorry I’d missed Anna Nicole. And I am thinking of returning to Greek. Read more »
The New Camerata Opera performs a double bill of John Blow’s Venus and Adonis, sometimes dubbed the first English opera, and Gustav Holst’s Savitri.
Washington Concert Opera on the occasion of Gounod’s 200th birthday presented the American premiere of his first opera, Sapho.
This program honored the singer, composer and theorist Giulio Caccini, “Giulio da Romano,” on the 400th anniversary of his death.
Niccolò Jommelli, forgotten now, was quite well known in Italy and southern Germany in his day.
Cher Public