Reviews
Elina Garanca’s glorious Marguerite transformed La Damnation de Faust into the Met’s first essential must-see of the year.
We live in a time of open-season for jokes on ancient myths, mixing and matching, sometimes with great success, as The Book of Mormon and Hadestown demonstrate.
A Baroque Valentine’s with Opera Lafayette | Feb | DC & NYC
Celebrate love in all its guises with tender ballads, amorous duets, cheeky verses, and bawdy drinking songs plus food, cocktails and wine.
Ultimately, the unrelenting grimness of the subject matter allied to the sameness of the vocal writing made for a wearying evening.
Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Bolero is a dance-music-theater piece that Prototype Festival presented at the Joyce Theater through Saturday night.
I watched Greta Gerwig’s heartbreaking, gorgeous, joy-filled explosion of an adaptation of Little Women in about the best way one can, sniffling in the dark with my best friend, the closest person I have to a sister.
The opera’s radical vision lay in its enormous scale, which encompassed a hundred-strong community chorus taken from the ranks of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and Master Voices.
Rosa Feola immediately established with her first group that she’s a serious artist who brought to the concert format both a warmly appealing coppery soprano as well as detailed and savvy dramatic instincts.
I’m only now coming up for air after a night spent wading in the deep, cool, refractory waters of Magdalene, a work of immense, mythic joy and pain wrapped in the details of the ordinary.
Upon its commercial release three weeks ago, Tom Hooper’s film adaptation of Cats garnered instant, near-universal scorn from audiences and critics alike.
At the Metropolitan Opera on Friday night, an otherwise undistinguished Traviata was salvaged by an astonishing performance from Aleksandra Kurzak, whose Violetta was an incontrovertible triumph.
Composer Garrett Fisher and librettist Ellen McLaughlin’s Blood Moon wears its themes on its sleeve to great success in this spellbinding new opera.
Although the gold glitter cannons detonated at the end of the act were an ostentatious reminder that this was a celebration of the new year, it seemed that the only words on anyone’s lips as the audience filed out of the theater were “Viva Netrebko!”
The New York Gilbert And Sullivan Players is giving its umpteenth production of The Mikado through next Sunday at the Kaye Playhouse, and the show remains frisky and first rate.
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.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra reigned supreme at the opening night of Wozzeck on Friday evening, rendering every snarl and shimmer of Berg’s score with gripping intensity.
Each year, when I take in a performance of Messiah by the Philadelphia Orchestra as part of my own holiday tradition, I hope it will spark some new and exciting feeling inside of me, or offer a new way of looking at the musical drama as a whole.
Greater Clements provokes more genuine poignancy than the whole of The Inheritance in half the running time. There’s hardly a moment that isn’t painfully true to life.
Whether Lyric Opera of Chicago is an appropriate venue for such an intimate, gentle show as The Light in the Piazza is a subject of much critical debate.
If Sunday’s performance of Magic Flute at the Met demonstrated one thing, it is that opera targeted at children must be just as good as (if not better than) opera targeted at adults.
Günther Groissböck’s ridiculously entertaining Baron Ochs and Sir Simon Rattle’s enthralling conducting soared highest during a mostly excellent revival of Der Rosenkavalier.
Mozart and Donizetti could humanize characters in a farce—Mercadante in I due FIgaro cannot get a handle on them.
Jagged Little Pill is as manicured as the kind of Stepfordian society the material supposedly rails against.
Joyce DiDonato’s take on Winterreise is a conceptual misstep that, song after song, frustratingly dilutes and distracts from an often rewarding musical performance.
Heartbeat Opera has set Der Freischütz in a contemporary era, in a rural locale where gun culture reigns supreme and bullying is natural.
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
STEMdiva status
Ahead of a special boozy, bawdy Valentine’s Day concert, artistic director of Opera Lafayette Patrick Quigley speaks with soprano Maya Kherani about her journey from MIT to rising American Baroque star.