Reviews
Opera Philadelphia’s Il viaggio a Reims in a nutshell: Hyperactive, confusing, and distracting from (and sometimes for) the singers? Yes. Imaginative, wildly entertaining, and musically rewarding? Absolutely.
Wolf Trap Opera concluded its 2025 summer season last month with a production of Carmen that was vocally strong, though not entirely dramatically satisfying, amid challenging weather.
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.
Anna Pirozzi and Luca Salsi reunite in blazing form in Tosca at the Teatro San Carlo
The 25th anniversary revival of Dead Man Walking at San Francisco Opera is most moving in its quietest moments
In the pursuit of clowning, Anthony Roth Costanzo’s Galas may have lost sight of “the seriousness of the theme.”
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.
