Max Keller
(Saskia) Max(well) Keller writes about classical music and queerness. Their work has appeared in Out, Out Traveler, the Provincetown Independent, Provincetown Arts, and Early Music America. Currently New York City-based, they write the substack Poison Put to Sound.
Barbara Strozzi links two sensuous programs by L’Arpeggiata and Catapult Opera.
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
In the pursuit of clowning, Anthony Roth Costanzo’s Galas may have lost sight of “the seriousness of the theme.”
The term “narrative prosthesis” refers to the tendency for works of literature to use disability as the conflict upon which the whole narrative hinges. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is a quintessential example of “narrative prosthesis.”
In the “tormented writers’” room, two actors in goth makeup and bride-of-Frankenstein wigs are clacking on typewriters and throwing crumpled papers on the floor.
It’s not so much that I hated the Met Opera’s Grounded. I’m just not convinced that it should have been an opera.
Opera has always been Orpheus-obsessed.
Heartbeat Opera’s The Extinctionist — composed by Dan Schlosberg with a libretto by Amanda Quaid — is the first opera, as far as I know, to stage a pap smear.
What does it mean to be a “gender transcendent diva?”
The phrase “immersive Coffee Cantata experience” evokes being dipped into a giant, boiling vat of java.
Taylor Mac isn’t known for being short-winded.
Light streamed through the stained-glass windows of the Space at Irondale, once a church, during the Saturday matinée of Heather Christian’s Terce as part of the Prototype Festival.
The beginning of Mary Kouyoumdjian’s Adoration is marked by silence. The young Simon, played by Sammy Ivany, lies on his stomach, scribbling in a notebook.
A frigid air swept through the crypt of the Church of the Intercession on Friday, December 8, nearly blowing out the candles that cast a golden light on the bundled-up audience.
Heartbeat Opera knows how to party.
Let’s not forget that it’s only been two years since the Met mounted its first-ever opera by a Black composer.
The opera took place on an actual boat: the Lightship Ambrose in the South Street Seaport.
“A Concert for Sugihara”—presented at Carnegie Hall by New York City Opera and The American Society for Yad Vashem on Wednesday, April 19—marked 80 years since the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
It’s debated whether Lili Boulanger’s Faust et Hélène, clocking in at only about 30 minutes, can be considered a cantata, a one-act opera, or a “lyric episode.”
There’s nothing unusual about casting a woman in Solomon‘s titular role.
The program for Jasmine Rice LaBeija’s concert as part of Works & Process at the Guggenheim on Wednesday, March 8 read a bit like a curriculum vitae.
Ghost sex is part of the popular zeitgeist.
A Baroque Valentine’s with Opera Lafayette | Feb | DC & NYC
Celebrate love in all its guises with tender ballads, amorous duets, cheeky verses, and bawdy drinking songs plus food, cocktails and wine.
