Future imperfect
This year’s treat was Vittorio Gnecchi’s Cassandra, completed around 1905
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.
One finger exercise
David Lang is, per The New Yorker, a “postminimalist enfant terrible.”
Cuts like a knife
You may wonder what Rachmaninoff’s Aleko and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci have in common.
Opera Syria
“The music’s fun, but doesn’t Rossini repeat himself?”
Jersey shore
You don’t often hear the grand operas of Benjamin Britten on smaller stages.
Ezio said than done
Ezio was an inspired choice for Boston’s feisty Odyssey Opera to open its “When In Rome” festival.
“This is the very ecstasy of love”
The grand illusion is that we know it all. From four hundred years of opera, we’ve distilled the worthy survivors.
Live and empoisoned
In how many operas does the heroine drink poison and then go lengthily mad?
Another man’s Persian
The seventeenth-century works of Francisco Cavalli may be easier for modern audiences to accept.
Il giocondo
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?
In harem’s way
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.
Donizetti, lionized
Just when you thought it was safe to return to Rossini and Verdi—blam!
French tickler
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.
I don’t sleep, I dream
Bellini blossomed over us like a love fest.
Flying too high with some guy in the sky
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…
Gold school
The name Joseph Rumshinsky might ring a bell (or a shofar).
To harness song to human tragedy
LoftOpera gives performances of exceptional musical and theatrical polish in offbeat corners of Brooklyn.
Humans of old Madrid
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.
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress”
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.
Multicolored
Polish singers are chameleons. They have to be.
Outer Burroughs
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.
Inappropriately touching
“Operatic” generally refers to sung drama, but there is another meaning of that term: grandiose, outsize, hysterical.
Beyond the blue horizon
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.
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!
