John Yohalem
The program was set around themes of loss, of unfulfilled wishes, the endurance of loss, triumphant or depressed.
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This was a great and happy event, but it wasn’t so much a musical one.
If you have not been following the exploits of Teatro Grattacielo during lockdown, it’s not because they haven’t been exploitatory all over the place.
Jonathan Dove’s Flight, which premiered at Glyndebourne in 1998 and is now being streamed by the Seattle Opera, is structured like one of those baroque extravaganzas where some half dozen characters find themselves (in every sense) on a magical island, its properties little understood.
Dancing sheep! Flying sheep! Flying sheep who dance!
The performance of an opera, indeed, seems almost a third narrative, atop the dreamer under the scientific microscope and the larva turning into a butterfly, and the mingling is not always clear—but then, clarity never seems to be the intention.
The immediate and personal catastrophe interleaves with the general and universal and ancient.
Without furnishings to distract them, the cast prowled the stage with sinister energy, exchanging significant looks and deadly secrets as though fearing Nihilists behind every drapery.
The Murder of Halit Yozgat by Ben Frost and Petter Ekmann is flavorsome in its use of sound, vocal and otherwise, to explore the elements of the story, to keep you tied in, and guessing.
Nathan Hull was an operatic Quixote who did not go it alone, but inspired bands of optimists, giving proper employment to the many worthy New Yorkers mad enough to study voice and pleasure rare elsewhere to those of us thrilled to take it in.
We can delight in films that make use of motif to give opera-lovers an extra little jiggle.
Wagner must intrude at some point because he invented film music.
My first exposure to Lucia di Lammermoor came under the auspices of The Three Stooges.
Ester, Liberatrice del Popolo Ebreo was presented in concert on Thursday night by Salon/Sanctuary Concerts in the Brotherhood Synagogue on Gramercy Park, in proper time for Purim.
VIctor Herbert demonstrates in this slight, affectionate piece a talent for keeping his musico-dramatic balls in the air, as Madeleine’s spirits juggle, fall, rise again, and droop to elegant resignation at the last.
In Winterreise, Peter Mattei’s persona is burly and brusque, a sarcastic introvert, full of contempt for his romantic weaknesses with squalls of anger and lyrical reflection by turns.
We live in a time of open-season for jokes on ancient myths, mixing and matching, sometimes with great success, as The Book of Mormon and Hadestown demonstrate.
Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Bolero is a dance-music-theater piece that Prototype Festival presented at the Joyce Theater through Saturday night.
The New York Gilbert And Sullivan Players is giving its umpteenth production of The Mikado through next Sunday at the Kaye Playhouse, and the show remains frisky and first rate.
Mozart and Donizetti could humanize characters in a farce—Mercadante in I due FIgaro cannot get a handle on them.
Heartbeat Opera has set Der Freischütz in a contemporary era, in a rural locale where gun culture reigns supreme and bullying is natural.
What is opera for if not to commemorate a national epic tragedy and triumph?
Come ye addicts of melody! After long eclipse, Bel Canto shines again!
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