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.
In the seventies and eighties Dominick Argento (who turned ninety this year) was one of the most oft-performed of American opera composers.
By John Yohalem
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Flotow’s Martha, a work of 1847 that was popular around the world for a hundred years.
By John Yohalem
Riccardo Zandoni’s Il Grillo del Focolare is an opera after all.
By John Yohalem
Tchaikovsky’s Orleánskaia Djeva (The Maid of Orleans) kicked off Odyssey’s Opera’s fifth season
By John Yohalem
The turntable set looks much the same from any angle: gutted concrete tenements and perilous alleys, instantly recognizable as a scene of urban guerrilla mayhem.
By John Yohalem
Will Crutchfield’s Bel Canto at Caramoor program of concert operas concluded with a bang on Saturday with Bellini’s first success, Il Pirata.
By John Yohalem
It is always a pleasure to hear a great orchestra take on a major score that might sound half-muffled emerging from the pit of an opera house.
By John Yohalem
In the same season that Manhattan School of Music revived The Gypsy Baron, Riverside Theater around the corner is the site of Amore Opera’s “Season of Gypsy Operas.”
By John Yohalem
Diana Damrau has chosen for her new Erato recital disc Grand Opera 11 high-flying showpieces from ten operas by Giacomo Meyerbeer.
By John Yohalem
Zolotoy pyetushok (translated as The Golden Cockerel in English, is best known in these parts as Le Coq d’Or.
By John Yohalem
The cultiest of cult musicals, an All-American take on the Iliad and the Odyssey, the spectacularly witty Golden Apple of John Latouche (words) and Jerome Moross (music), opened Off Broadway in 1953 to some acclaim.
By John Yohalem
Douglas Moore’s score for The Ballad of Baby Doe has everything that could please and little that could offend.
By John Yohalem
Antonio Literes, a boy soprano from Majorca, had, we may presume, friends in high places.
By John Yohalem
It is much to be regretted that song recitalists stick to the tried, the true, the excessively familiar when the repertory of song is so vast, so full of treasures ready for the light
By John Yohalem
In The Gypsy Baron (Der Zigeunerbaron), currently (through Sunday) enjoying a revival by the Manhattan School of Music Opera Theater, you get Strauss waltzes and patriotic marches.
By John Yohalem
Be wary of operas that are famous for just one aria or just one famous opinion.
By John Yohalem
I was puzzled by my initial exposure to the Medea of Aribert Reimann, a work of 2010.
By John Yohalem
A brilliant production of La Juive like that of Peter Konwitschny generalizes the message that mindless hate does not pay and the mindless mob is always the enemy of civilization.
By John Yohalem
La Campana Sommersa (The Sunken Bell), which is being presented by the New York City Opera at the Rose Theater through April 7, is a true oddball.
By John Yohalem
Leos Janacek composed Adventures of Vixen Sharp-Ears, with its singing forest creatures of many species, in 1922-23.
By John Yohalem
The New Amsterdam Opera Company presented a concert Forza (orchestra and chorus, yes; sets and costumes, no) at $35 a ticket.
By John Yohalem
Since Gilbert and Sullivan remain constant in the light-opera repertory, somewhere between Fledermaus and Les Mis in popular esteem, there must be good reasons their final collaboration, The Grand Duke, is seldom revived.
By John Yohalem
Opera composers do not often change their spots.
By John Yohalem
Pretty Yende was still hanging around after her last Barbiere and she knows the role of Elvira, having sung it in Zurich last June.
By John Yohalem
