Pride in your work
Pittsburgh Opera’s Fellow Travelers delivers a timely story with detail and care.
Performance Reviews
Reviews of operatic, vocal, and classical performances at the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, all across America, and around the world.
Blue it
Jeanine Tesori’s Blue is an ambitious and worthy opera that deserves a better presentation than it got at Lincoln Center on Saturday.
Alien encounter
“Protect the dolls, they say, but who really cares for them?” This question, posed by performer Mara Snip during the postlude of Neuköllner Oper’s 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, had a clear answer: Aliens.
Scarcity mindset
Michael Thalmeier‘s Tristan und Isolde in Berlin asks, how much minimalism is too much minimalism?
Do the locomotion
As my friend and I Ubered out to the luxurious Cobb Energy Centre for Atlanta Opera’s La traviata, I had trains on the mind.
Damned to hell
Only the singers, led by Benjamin Bernheim, can salvage a dismal La Damnation de Faust at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées.
Beyond the wail
Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci at Lyric Opera of Chicago are hysterical in all the wrong ways.
Comic relief
Pacific Opera Project’s high-spirited revival of Fra Diavolo is both therapy and an escape.
The replacements
Second casts in Don Giovanni and Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera offer mixed blessings.
To our glorious dead
The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra offered a rending reading of Britten‘s massive War Requiem with an eclectic trio of soloists.
We wear the masque
A brief concert at the Frick Collection teases the multifaceted artistry of Davóne Tines
Tag team
The women were the highlights of Washington National Opera’s militaristic Aïda
Beyond the merely pretty
J’Nai Bridges makes a sophisticated companion to the Morgan Library & Museum’s Renoir Drawings exhibit.
Bring on the lovers, liars and clowns
San Diego Opera’s Pagliacci puts a play within a play within a play.
Grail against the machine
A new production of Parsifal at San Francisco Opera stirred something deep inside Michael Anthonio about how music soothes the soul
Frieze frame
Shirin Neshat‘s Aïda in Paris is a typical instance of what happens when an artist is brought in to direct an opera.
In the beginning
In Jacopo Peri’s seminal Euridice, the Newberry Consort and Haymarket Opera made a compelling case for putting you in the room where it happened.
Vigorous to rigorous
Dmitry Matvienko led a performance of Mussorgsky and Shostakovich at La Monnaie with meticulous rectitude.
School gyrls
What Opera Lafayette’s Dido and Aeneas lost in gravitas it gained in charm and specificity.
Undoing of woman
Anthony Hüseyin‘s eclectic recital in Berlin explores femicide in opera through a queer, nonbinary lens.
Up the creek and over the hill
Matthias Goerne‘s Die schöne Müllerin at Carnegie Hall offers a hoary and excessive collection of mannerisms and vocal tics that served the artist more than the music itself.
Avec la victoire, l’instant du bonheur
Buoyed by a strong cast, The Metropolitan Opera continues its autumn bel canto streak with a winning revival of Donizetti’s La fille du regiment.
The scorned mother of us all
Seeing Sondra Radvanovsky as Medea at Lyric Opera of Chicago sprawled across the floor, soaked in her children’s blood, is proof that we’re witnessing an utterly haunting singer-actor.
Dona nobis pacem
A Missa Solemnis to celebrate 125 years of Boston’s Symphony Hall was sophisticated and subdued.
I’ll take the fall
The days are getting shorter, but you can keep the prattle going this fall’s Talk of the Town! You will, you can, you must join in the discussion about: Great mezzo soprano performances (October),
Gained in translation (November), Teleport me back to… (December).