John Yohalem
For those who like their Handel loud, with no forfeit of baroque finesse, one promising solution is to make the hall smaller.
By John Yohalem
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They say that Boston, despite many cultural distinctions, ain’t no opera town, and for some decades—generations?—this has been true. But tides of change will break, even on the shores of the Hub.
By John Yohalem
As One is an opera about a boy growing up to discover that he is a girl.
By John Yohalem
The little opera companies of New York are like chanterelles.
By John Yohalem
Two operas both alike in dignity, set in dimly lit Renaissance towns ruled by seething, conspiratorial courts.
By John Yohalem
“Who will dare dance with me the ancient Dagger-Dance of the Californians?”
By John Yohalem
Opera-lovers who attend too much modern opera may find that it feels like duty.
By John Yohalem
Zofia Posmysz spent two years as a prisoner in Auschwitz—and she’s still alive and standing pretty tall, in New York for the Lincoln Center Festival God bless her.
By John Yohalem
Think of it as the anti-Puritani.
By John Yohalem
The operas of Franz Josef Haydn are seldom presented in the great opera houses of the world, but then, they weren’t composed for the great opera houses of his own world.
By John Yohalem
Andris Nelsons led the Vienna Philharmonic in a performance of Salome that provided just the sort of thing one hopes for in a concert performance of an overflowingly rich operatic score.
By John Yohalem
We were not at Carnegie Hall to hear superb opera singers bestow their vocalism upon Alban Berg’s Wozzeck; we are there to hear the Wiener Staatsoper’s house band work their magic upon an intricate, spooky, devastating score.
By John Yohalem
On February 29, 1812 (thanks to Pope Gregory’s calendrical reforms), Gioachino Rossini celebrated his fourth birthday.
By John Yohalem
When Winston Churchill was First Sea Lord, the story goes, an indignant admiral accused him of violating British naval tradition, to which Churchill replied that the only traditions of the British Navy were rum, sodomy and the lash.
By John Yohalem
Marc-Antoine Charpentier came along at the wrong time for a composer of French opera.
By John Yohalem
Eight hundred years ago, the “youth of Beauvais” in the north of France created a sacred festival “play,” Ludus Danieli (ludus—meaning a sacred event? a performance? a game? a joke?) for the annual Fool’s Night on January 1 at the cathedral.
By John Yohalem
Each year, Leon Botstein leads the American Symphony Orchestra in a concert opera or two.
By John Yohalem
Ambiguity. That’s the theme of the operas of Benjamin Britten (ennobled as Baron Britten of Aldeburgh).
By John Yohalem
What we go to Grattacielo for is fresh young voices singing their guts out.
By John Yohalem
The simple fable at the heart of Die Frau ohne Schatten shouldn’t be difficult to parse, but Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto juggles its vaguely Jungian, vaguely Arabian Nights symbolitry as if with intent to mystify and bewilder.
By John Yohalem
Whenever I encounter Eric Owens, he’s plotting to conquer the universe.
By John Yohalem
Baden-Baden 1927 is the title Gotham Chamber Opera has given to its evening of four brief operas that premiered together at a festival in, yes, Baden-Baden on July 17, 1927.
By John Yohalem
An impresario with a hit on his hands—Emanuel Schikaneder, for instance, after the initial run of Die Zauberflöte—will crave nothing so much as an opportunity to hit the same bell.
By John Yohalem
Last night, the Met opened the 2013-14 season with a handsome, fairly conservative new production of Eugene Onegin by Deborah Warner that replaces the handsome, fairly conservative one by Robert Carsen. (The trend is clear.)
By John Yohalem
