Pride before the fall
Opera Parallèle’s Harvey Milk Reimagined offers a fragmented portrait lacking the depth or coherence needed to honor Milk’s legacy
Performance Reviews
Reviews of operatic, vocal, and classical performances at the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, all across America, and around the world.
The turning point
The Comet/Poppea at this summer’s Running AMOC* festival at Lincoln Center is a thrilling, startling, deeply moving experience
Turkish sound bath
A brilliant L’italiana in Algeri in Rome has Larry Wolff once again thinking about “singing Turks”
Up an Octavia
The operatic offerings of Boston Early Music Festival — Keiser‘s Octavia and Telemann‘s Pimpinone and Ino — are delectable discoveries
New world charm
The Met Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin surges into summer with a mixed program at Carnegie Hall
They call me the wanderer
Kent Nagano‘s and the Richard-Wagner-Akademie‘s historically informed Ring Cycle takes on Siegfried in Dresden
Drama therapy
Carmen in Brussels is dramatically vibrant, if vocally stretched
Sea no evil
A muted production challenges a talented cast in San Francisco Opera’s Idomeneo
Charm city offensive
A starry concert Aïda in Baltimore proves unusually polished
The head on the cake plate
John Yohalem reports on Catapult Opera’s satiating San Giovanni Battista
Married to the mob
Contrasting approaches to Regie duke it out in Cavalleria rusticana & Pagliacci and Rusalka in Munich
Those in glass houses
Krzysztof Warlikowski‘s Der Rosenkavalier at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées surpasses even Nigel Wilkinson‘s high ‘WTF threshhold’
You can go your own way
Eli Jacobson on a luscious evening of early Strauss with Guntram at Carnegie Hall
Not an asset to the abbey
Francesco Filidei’s new opera The Name of the Rose struggles to bridge the past and the present in Milan
The sweet escape?
A plodding La bohème in San Francisco never quite takes off
Georges has Georges
A double bill of rare Bizet works in Paris is not something any of us needs to do more than once
Höchste Lust!
Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads the Philadelphia Orchestra, Stuart Skelton, and Nina Stemme in a Tristan und Isolde for the ages
Venetian blinding
West Bay Opera’s Otello punches well above its weight
Summertime lovin’
An impressively well-rounded revival of Francesca Zambello‘s production of Porgy and Bess concludes the Washington National Opera season
Many happy returns
The Met’s mostly successful revivals of The Queen of Spades and La bohème showcase the returns of Sonya Yoncheva and Corinne Winters
Virginia is for lovers
An innovative score and fluid production by Denyce Graves-Montgomery are highlights of Virginia Opera’s production of Loving v. Virginia
Reconcilable differences
Cameron Kelsall reports on a transcendent Jenufa from the Cleveland Orchestra
The revolution will be digitized
The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs at the Kennedy Center: not a poorly made opera, but so relentlessly mid.
Three ages of woman
Asmik Grigorian’s scorching turn in Il trittico in Paris has Nigel Wilkinson wondering, ‘what is it that makes Americans so weepy?’
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).