John Yohalem
You don’t often hear the grand operas of Benjamin Britten on smaller stages.
By John Yohalem
Ezio was an inspired choice for Boston’s feisty Odyssey Opera to open its “When In Rome” festival.
By John Yohalem
The grand illusion is that we know it all. From four hundred years of opera, we’ve distilled the worthy survivors.
By John Yohalem
In how many operas does the heroine drink poison and then go lengthily mad?
By John Yohalem
The seventeenth-century works of Francisco Cavalli may be easier for modern audiences to accept.
By John Yohalem
With six leads in Gioconda, you can reliably hope that three or four will be worth listening to, or why would they have revived the opera?
By John Yohalem
Othello in the Seraglio is the rather unfortunate title bestowed by the ensemble Dünya on its “coffeehouse opera,” ossia The Tragedy of Sümbül the Black Eunuch.
By John Yohalem
Just when you thought it was safe to return to Rossini and Verdi—blam!
By John Yohalem
The concert presented by Opera Lafayette at the Alliance Française last Friday and Saturday was devoted to music of witty, short-lived Emmanuel Chabrier, notably Une Éducation Manquée.
By John Yohalem
Bellini blossomed over us like a love fest.
By John Yohalem
If only—if only half the creativity and spectacle that Encompass New Opera Theatre has lavished on its lively production of The Astronaut’s Tale (at the BAM Fisher through Sunday) had been expended on the pretentious libretto by the late Jack Larsonand the quirky, unappealing score by Charles Fussell…
By John Yohalem
The name Joseph Rumshinsky might ring a bell (or a shofar).
By John Yohalem
LoftOpera gives performances of exceptional musical and theatrical polish in offbeat corners of Brooklyn.
By John Yohalem
Bare Opera, the feisty little company that gave Debussy’s exquisite L’Enfant Prodigue in Chelsea last spring, is now operating in chic, rundown Bushwick where so many original enterprises sprout.
By John Yohalem
In New York, tradition insists, there are no limits to where a preposterous idea, talent and relentless determination will take you, in defiance of all the odds.
By John Yohalem
Polish singers are chameleons. They have to be.
By John Yohalem
New York is different now, and John Zorn has this hangout, The Stone, on Avenue C (you heard me) at Second Street, a performance space the size of a largeish dorm room.
By John Yohalem
“Operatic” generally refers to sung drama, but there is another meaning of that term: grandiose, outsize, hysterical.
By John Yohalem
Besides the heavens and a sweater in The Devil Wears Prada, it is the hue of Hibla Gerzmava’s soprano, in contrast to the red or rose or red-orange voices of most sopranos.
By John Yohalem
LoftOpera is just one, though perhaps the liveliest, of many homegrown opera troupes in Brooklyn.
By John Yohalem
Homer, inspired by many a muse, sang not of sequels to his Iliad.
By John Yohalem
Richard Strauss’s many one-act operas make excellent concert programs, both for their length (usually under two hours) and the primary place each gives the orchestration, a specialty where Strauss’s brilliance seldom deserted him.
By John Yohalem
