Performance Review
Reviews of operatic, vocal, and classical performances at the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, across America, and around the world.
Reviews of operatic, vocal, and classical performances at the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, across America, and around the world.
In Munich, performances by 97-year-old Herbert Blomstedt and 32-year-old Thomas Guggeis show the city’s orchestral ensembles at their best
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Eat the Document, which premiered at the Prototype Festival last week, compresses a decades-long, nonlinear story into a swift 90 minutes while still finding time to pause for reflection.
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David Fox and Cameron Kelsall take on a new revival of Gypsy: Is there any gayer or more impassioned theater topic?
Apologies in advance to Key’mon Murrah, whose rather extraordinary Marian Anderson award recital with pianist Brian Zeger at the Kennedy Center on December 17 demands some general musing.
Despite not being very happy with the state of the world (and the union) and not looking forward to the New Year, this past December I took in many festive holiday offerings including a pair of oratorios.
I had been hopeful that 2024 would end, if not on a high note, then one that was at least in tune.
What can you say, other than that everything was fab?
There are two problems to address – problems of the sort the arts thrive on addressing.
While the Met’s Mozart-lite holiday production of The Magic Flute kept the eyes entertained with spectacular sets and costumes, the scattershot casting and lack of musical seriousness dragged down this opera for beginners.
If song recitals by opera stars Piotr Beczala and Asmik Grigorian sometimes came up short, Semyon Bychkov’s powerful rendition of the Glagolitic Mass instantly became one of the year’s highlights.
Last Thursday evening, pure virtuosity was on display at the Veterans’ Room of the Park Avenue Armory, courtesy of soprano Barbara Hannigan and pianist Bertrand Chamayou.
It was, at least, a jolly good show. Whether or not it actually suited Stravinsky’s music or Auden and Kallman’s text, is another question.
The court of Mantua has run away to join the circus; Washington, DC and Baltimore’s experimental opera company, IN Series, transformed Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto in a new production set under the big top this winter.
Back to Brussels last Sunday for my third new opera of the season (after The Time of our Singing, also at La Monnaie, and Picture a day like this, at the Opéra Comique): Mikael Karlsson’s Fanny and Alexander, with a libretto by Royce Vavrek.
American opera and its institutions are experiencing an identity crisis. Nowhere is this clearer than in Tazewell Thompson and Jeanine Tesori’s Blue.
Here’s the bottom line: at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall stage on December 3, Iestyn Davies and viol consort Fretwork made the sweetest sounds I’ve heard from human beings all year.
On Tuesday night, in the commodious concert hall of the Morgan Library, the Boston Early Music Festival forces brought Georg Philipp Telemann’s Don Quichotte auf der Hochzeit des Comacho to New York.
Washington Concert Opera returned on November 24th for its first show of the 2024-2025 season with a production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, another (relative) rarity from the composer following last year’s season-closing presentation of La rondine.
A recent conversation with a friend who has loved Die Frau ohne Schatten for twice as long as I have been alive revealed that we both had some unresolved questions about the plot.
Christina Colanduoni on Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Le Nozze di Figaro
The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s program of works by Mozart and Kevin Puts, a composer championed by star Renée Fleming, was one of musical and artistic contrasts.
Christopher Corwin reviews Pablo Larraín‘s Maria
Montagu James reviews the US tour of the Kirill Petrenko-led Berlin Philharmonic
War! Heroism! Mysterious strangers! Attempted suicide! Steadfast love! Così fan tutte, as staged November 18-21 at Juilliard Opera, had… none of these things.
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