Harry Rose
Puccini’s schmaltziest, most melodic, most dramatically limp, most cynical, most obscure mature work
And is this ‘Orpheus’ in the room with us right now?
Real estate is hot along the Acela corridor right now: as proof, Judith will have toured at least three castles in New York and Boston between this spring and last.
The flashing eyes, the floating hair, and the inexplicable barefootnedness during the second half of Saturday night’s performance confirmed one thing: Kristine Opolais is back.
It says something about Boston’s opera scene that one of the most consistently ambitious events of the opera season is a one-off performance played by the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras.
Julia Bullock seems to fission herself multiple times over during the course of her newest, widely ranging recital program.
New York shall never be in need of another Messiah to assist to during the holiday season, but a new tradition is beginning to crystallize at the cavernous St. John the Divine to rival it.
Gioachino Rossini’s adorable adaptation of Cinderella famously dispenses with a slipper in favor of a bracelet to lead the Principe Ramiro back to his Cenerentola. If only this performance had benefitted from such a glittering guiding hand.
Phil Chan described his point of departure for reimagining Orientalist works as the question, “what else could this be?”
Before rehearsals for Madama Butterfly started, Phil Chan sat down with the box to chat about his production, opera’s cultural appropriation problem, and why the last thing he’s trying to do is cancel Puccini.
If sex sells, then the 40 years of success for Evita show that the strawman construction and vicious takedown of an unsexy, supremely unlikable woman in just under two-and-a-half hours is just as viable a quantity.
In Boston Lyric Opera’s production of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, which closed on Sunday after a nearly sold-out run—there are no doors.
I can’t imagine anything more anxiety-inducing than being put in at last-minute to sing a role in a high-profile production at the Met.
There is a moment about 75% of the way through the Rome Narrative where you can almost literally hear Tannhäuser’s stomach turn.
Shortly before Tuesday’s performance of Salome at La Scala, I did something I rarely do: I took a mirror selfie.
Following new productions of Tosca in 2017, Adriana Lecouvreur in 2018, and the Anna Netrebko-led Puccini orgy of 2019, New Year’s Eve at the Met has come to signify that verismo, as this school tends to be known, is still kicking.
All things were, indeed, made new again, when Boston’s venerable Handel & Haydn Society brought Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro to the stage, their first time doing so in its entirety, as their 2,576th concert on Thursday.
In George Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante, the dancers are dancing even before the curtain goes up.
Yuval Sharon at Boston Lyric Opera has brilliantly found an interpretative middle ground for La bohème by presenting the acts in reverse order.
A troika of operas by Rachmaninoff: Aleko , The Miserly Knight and Francesca da Rimini , courtesy of Odyssey Opera.
This Traviata remained firmly Beltway-bound and by the time I had gotten home, the 45-minute traffic jam to leave the parking lot was eminently fresher in my mind than the evening’s performance.
Director R.B. Schlather deftly walks a porous boundary, casting this primordial paroxysm of Germanness as a dialogue between its naïve and moralistic narrative with its outsized legacy.
The monsoon outside was no match for the torrents of gorgeous, dramatic singing and playing that was unleashed inside George Washington University’s Lisner Hall Sunday afternoon when Washington Concert Opera, in a glorious deluge of Léo Delibes, presented Lakmé to round out its return season.
It’s maybe not a surprise that Carmen is neither a good vocal nor temperamental fit for Isabel Leonard.