Reviews
This was a great and happy event, but it wasn’t so much a musical one.
Last weekend, On Site Opera presented What Lies Beneath, a program of maritime-themed operatic excerpts staged aboard the 19th century schooner Wavertree (now a part of the South Street Seaport Museum).
Lawrence Brownlee and Michael Spyres are two singers at the top of their game, as this concert showed, virtually peerless in music as punishing as it is pretty.
Bay Street Theater deserves enormous credit for transforming Camelot from a clumsy historical epic into a breezy, human fairytale about leaders who cannot lead.
The San Francisco Opera became the first US opera company to present a full-blown production indoors on its home turf this season when they ushered the US opera audience into 2021-22 Season on Saturday September 21 with a stellar performance of Giacomo Puccini’s perennial favorite Tosca.
Concerts at Wolf Trap, mixed bags in more ways than one, provided fleeting glimpses of the old normal as moments of frisson mingled with more familiar monotony.
Who’s been hiding tenor Benjamin Bernheim from me all this time?
Like many composers of his generation, Ernest Chausson was enthralled by Wagner and he too turned to legend for his only opera, one that would consume him for final decade of his brief life.
For this revival of Tosca Teatro Real has configured several casts with some of the best singers in the world: Sondra Radvanovsky, Maria Agresta, Anna Netrebko, Joseph Calleja, Michael Fabiano, Yusif Eyvazov, Jonas Kaufmann, Carlos Álvarez, Gevorg Hakobyan and Luca Salsi.
Last night, for the first time in nearly a year and a half, opera returned to Lincoln Center.
As soon as James Clutton, the new Opera Holland Park director, stepped on stage to welcome the audience, we all knew that we were not at the typical English summer opera festival.
Pauline Viardot‘s Cendrillon hews closer to the Perrault original than either Rossini or Massenet’s more familiar retellings and is dainty in conception as a salon opera for her students.
The crown jewel of this year’s Munich Festival is undoubtedly Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which opened the Festival on June 29 and will close the Festival with an “Opera for All” screening on July 31.
Zachary James builds on his early career experience as a musical theater performer to deliver a thoughtfully crafted, blessedly restrained Quixote/Cervantes.
For the weeks between the announcement that the return of Wolf Trap Opera would, in part, take the form of a concert performance of Sweeney Todd and its opening at the Filene Center on Friday evening, I racked my brain: why Sweeney now?
Today’s listener has heard the scores of the classic Westerns that borrowed from Puccini (and Wagner!) to create the sound of the myth of the West.
Plucked from obscurity by Howard Hughes and sold to the public as a buxom, brunette heir apparent to his former protégé, Jean Harlow, Jane Russell became a household name before she ever shot a single reel of film.
March 2, 2020 – June 18, 2021: Those 15 months were the longest I’ve gone without attending a live opera performance since high school.
Though the formal recorded aria recital is the ultimate calling card of an artist, the invitation to the spectator to receive, listen, and critically behold of the offerings (on fire or burnt), they are but a souvenir and there are a few drawbacks inherent with the presentation.
When LA Opera finally decided to put a toe in the water and mount its first production since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was Igor Stravinsky‘s opera/oratorio Oedipus Rex.
If you have not been following the exploits of Teatro Grattacielo during lockdown, it’s not because they haven’t been exploitatory all over the place.
Director Jon M. Chu’s film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights has come around at exactly the right moment.
Faith. The title of this fourth and final chapter of Adam Guettel’s Myths and Hymns made me pause for reflection.
I’ve enjoyed these streamed recitals, warts and all, and always appreciate the chance to watch performers let their hair down, so to speak.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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