Sylvia Korman
Sylvia Korman is a recent graduate from Barnard College and 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 ? boy eternal ? and people mad at opera.
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!
Ivo van Hove really seems to be everywhere lately.
I do not envy Jennifer Rowley the task of stepping into Anna Netrebko’s shoes.
I really cannot exaggerate the extent to which I truly did not know what was going on in New York City Opera’s production of Maria de Buenos Aires.
Hunger was the note of the night, a sentiment shared between the audience and Proving Up, a lean and hungry one-act telling a story of drought and desperation on the post-Civil War Western frontier.
I’m no fach expert but I will admit the “gay stile” is a new one for me — somewhere between the lyric and the dramatic tenor voices, perhaps?
I love the comments that really seem to think they balanced the positive with the negative.
Sounds like a better Friday night than “what the composer intended.”
Broadway’s new Head Over Heels is anything but under committed; it’s a show with an irresistibly fun spirit and an infallibly good heart.