Reviews
For our first review in a new series, we turn to the new recording of Dido and Aeneas featuring Joyce DiDonato, Michael Spyres and Maxim Emelyanychev leading Il Pomo d’Oro.
Adela Zaharia and Amartuvshin Enkhbat shine brightly in San Francisco Opera’s opening night Rigoletto.
Restrictions encourage creative staging, for which the Berkshire Opera Festival is renowned.
Le nozze di Figaro in Santa Fe is a light and kindly revival while The Turn of the Screw is crisp and atmospheric
The Santa Fe Opera’s fine first Die Walküre finds Wagner in America at a crossroads.
Rigoletto at The Santa Fe Opera is a near miss.
La bohème at The Santa Fe Opera feels warmed over in more ways than one.
Christof Loy‘s Louise in Aix-en-Provence scratches at the urban– and operatic– unconscious
The world premiere of Dolores and Charpentier‘s David and Jonathan bring the heat to West Edge Opera’s 2025 Festival.
Wolf Trap Opera’s stirring production of Dialogues des Carmélites was a welcome respite from a brutally hot and humid DC summer.
R.B. Schlather‘s shadowy production with Heartbeat Opera at the Williamstown Theatre Festival proves that Vanessa might be coming into its own at last
Tobias Kratzer‘s Das Rheingold in Munich kicks off a Ring for the post-secular age
Valentin Schwarz‘s and Simone Young‘s Ring, in its final outing at Bayreuth, is dramaturgically messy and musically excellent.
The repertory company of Munich’s Gärtnerplatztheater brings sparkle to a goofy, summery L’elisir d’amore
This summer’s festival, taking place amid record high temperatures and in the wake of its artistic director, Pierre Audi, featured a disquietingly zeigeisty focus on sexual violence.
In Lohengrin, populism comes to an apocalyptic end on the Bavarian stage
Peter Sellars‘s triple bill of Viennese modernism featuring Erwartung and a concert performance of The Raft of the Medusa stare down death at the Salzburg Festival
Claus Guth mines urgent and contemporary commentary from Die Liebe der Danae in Munich.
This Bard production, led by Leon Botstein, makes the strongest possible case musically, dramatically and visually for Smetana’s opera Dalibor.
A revival of the furious I masnadieri at the Bayerische Staatsoper falls short of perfection – and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Pénélope at the Bayerische Staatsoper’s summer festival spotlights the crossroads between the nostalgic and the progressive.
Matthias Davids‘s reactionary new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg might be fun, but no one comes to Bayreuth for fun.
A North American debut of a respectable French Baroque ensemble, an ebullient presentation of La fille du régiment, and an afternoon soiree in Wine Country proved to be the hottest (yet affordable!) tickets around here this Summer.
In the 1847 version of Macbeth, the forces of Teatro Nuovo lacked the thunderous punch this music can pack, but provided a pleasant ride
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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