review / performance
Puccini’s schmaltziest, most melodic, most dramatically limp, most cynical, most obscure mature work
La forza del destino concluded its run at the Metropolitan Opera with a significant cast change.
The past seems to be in conversation with the present.
Not in my wildest dreams could I have come up with anything more homosexual than the sight of Almodóvar muse Rossy de Palma in a stage-length wedding gown onstage Madrid’s Teatro Real.
The tragic speaker of Schubert’s Winterreise makes his fateful journey but once, yet some singers cannot help trodding the path again and again.
Since I began regularly attending performances at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1999, I have been a great admirer of director Francesca Zambello’s productions.
“What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest. Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest.”
And is this ‘Orpheus’ in the room with us right now?
Opera at the Kennedy Center has been in hibernation this winter.
It would be enough to compare his official studio recording of this work with the recent performances in Turin to confirm that today Riccardo Muti is no longer totally ‘Mutian’
Bay Area audiences starved for vocal fare during its opera’s winter/spring hiatus recently experienced two exceptional concerts with distinguished singing at the Davies Symphony Hall.
It’s not hard not to feel jaded about Romeo and Juliet.
Those of us in New York City who relish 17th century Italian vocal music were offered an enticing banquet over the past few weeks.
Émigré, unfortunately, fails to do justice, either musically or theatrically, to this group of refugees or to the Shanghainese who took them in.