Sylvia Korman
Sylvia Korman is a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center a recent devotee of all things opera. They like mezzos in pants, Met Opera student tickets and reading the comments sections. See their tweets at cowboyverismo and people mad at opera.
Elza van den Heever and Peter Mattei (and the stage elevator) elevate an assertive, if not definitive, new Salome at the Met
Turmoil and injustice in the federal government; turmoil and grief in the Catholic Church: the time sure seems right for a staging of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites.
Missy Mazzoli has established herself as one of contemporary opera’s most skilled and subtle architects of emotional response, and her latest, The Listeners—now at the Lyric Opera of Chicago—is no exception.
Ainadamar never quite found its identity between the two poles of conceptual and concrete.
Sylvia Korman previews The Listeners, the latest and most ambitious opera by Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek that opens this week at Opera Philadelphia with tickets for just $11
It was an unexpected tone for the cold stone and moody ambiance of the catacombs—an odd juxtaposition that I’m not sure really worked.
This Clemenza seemed more or less unconcerned with the opera’s political imagination, content to take Tito at his word that his rule is morally enlightened and the citizens at theirs that a benevolent dictatorship is a wonderful thing indeed.
If it didn’t all work, it wouldn’t work at all.
Two months ago, when climate activists interrupted a performance of Tannhaüser at the Met, the banners they unfurled from the balconies announced, “no opera on a dead planet.”
Angel Island seemed a piece with two simultaneous goals: to musically interpret the poetry of Angel Island detainees and to educate its audience on the history of Asian and particularly Chinese immigration to America.
In its Met premier, neither a talented cast nor some beautiful musical moments were enough to make Florencia feel new or vital.
The Hunt’s strongest argument for the possibility of growth, connection, and agency even under adverse and restrictive circumstances lay, of course, in its music, in which three individual voices were able to combine and transform into something infinitely rich and strange.
Like a sommelier of male entitlement, Peter Mattei paired with precision moves from a wide-ranging vocabulary of gesture.
Verdi’s Falstaff is a brilliantly written opera: funny, with a complex ability to operate across minutely shifting registers of farce and lyricism. It needs, ideally, a production and cast capable of executing both comedy and drama, irony and sincerity—often concurrently. In its current Met revival, happily, Falstaff has everything it needs.
Do you ever wonder how easy it is to invent a Christmas tradition?
Step aside, Texas: “Everything is bigger at Aida” is the motto of the Met’s second attempt at retiring Sonja Frisell’s colossal production.
Come back, Big Clock! We need you more than ever!
It was Matthew Jocelyn’s libretto, with its disorientingly deconstructive approach to its source text, that gave Brett Dean’s Hamlet its identity.
What is there to say about the Franco Zeffirelli Bohème? What is left to say?
Is there any opera more bullet-proof than Le Nozze di Figaro?
Saturday night’s Rosenkavalier at the Met was an evening of excess — beautiful singing, sensitive acting, elaborate sets, and an unfortunate business that mars Robert Carsen’s otherwise excellent production.
I find it difficult to experience Madama Butterfly without also experiencing an odd fracturing of the self.
We are the elusive, the mysterious, the ever-courted Millennial Audience, Mr. Darcy to the marketing department’s Mrs. Bennet.
Oh, that slippery Don Giovanni—so elusive, so chaotic, so open to no end of interpretation!
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