Patrick Clement James
Patrick Clement James is a writer and teacher based in New York City. His love of opera began in high school, leading to studies in vocal performance at the Manhattan School of Music. He currently studies English literature as a Ph.D. student at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and he teaches at Brooklyn College. As a writer, he is particularly interested in the ways that opera participates in the larger contexts of history and culture.
To be honest, I have never seen anything quite like Matthias Goerne in recital. He seemed so wonderfully free.
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In a striking program at Carnegie Hall last night, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s), with guest vocalist Susan Graham, brought together a wide array of musical proclivities—good and good bad taste alike.
In Charlie Parker’s Yardbird, an opera based on the famed jazz musician’s life, the title character asks, “So if there is a God, why does the negro suffer? Is my prayer, my music lesser, smaller in God’s eyes?”
What is an Orphic moment? A song so sweet that even Hades must release the dead back to the living?
With recent events in politics, it is becoming ever clearer that humankind hasn’t evolved much since the Enlightenment.
Tenor Paul Appleby’s onstage persona is as American as apple crisp, and he possesses the untroubled confidence of a politician.
An astute double-feature exposes all the complexities of female suffering embedded within two canonical works.
After two previous productions of Tosca in New York City this season (the Met’s revival of the controversial Luc Bondy version and NYCO Renaissance’s depressingly retrograde take), New Yorkers finally got a pleasing, if rough-edged, performance of the Puccini classic from LoftOpera.
If I were Renée Fleming, I, too, would indulge myself.
A vibrant burlesque, this adult iteration of the classic fairytale manages to arch its back against the past while crawling toward the future.
New York City Opera has officially launched its “renaissance” at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater last night with a production of Puccini’s Tosca that should please a lot of older, conservative audiences, if not the adventurous operagoers that City Opera courted in the past.
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