At liberty to divulge
If it didn’t all work, it wouldn’t work at all.
Performance Reviews
Reviews of operatic, vocal, and classical performances at the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, all across America, and around the world.
Decadent genealogies
Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder and Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot are, in their different ways, the final decadent flowering of a musical tradition at its twilight.
Still glowin’, still crowin’, still goin’ strong
Matthew Polenzani returned triumphantly to his comfort zone in a Philadelphia Chamber Music Society recital on April 2.
Dancing at the edge of the world
Puccini’s schmaltziest, most melodic, most dramatically limp, most cynical, most obscure mature work
Character is destiny
La forza del destino concluded its run at the Metropolitan Opera with a significant cast change.
Brazilian brass lift
The past seems to be in conversation with the present.
Women on the verge of a nervous breakup
Not in my wildest dreams could I have come up with anything more homosexual than the sight of Almodóvar muse Rossy de Palma in a stage-length wedding gown onstage Madrid’s Teatro Real.
If on a winter’s night a traveler
The tragic speaker of Schubert’s Winterreise makes his fateful journey but once, yet some singers cannot help trodding the path again and again.
Unqualified triumph
Since I began regularly attending performances at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1999, I have been a great admirer of director Francesca Zambello’s productions.
Femenine mystique
“What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest. Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest.”
The artist is present
And is this ‘Orpheus’ in the room with us right now?
Bird brain
Opera at the Kennedy Center has been in hibernation this winter.
Muti point
It would be enough to compare his official studio recording of this work with the recent performances in Turin to confirm that today Riccardo Muti is no longer totally ‘Mutian’
Color me impressed
Bay Area audiences starved for vocal fare during its opera’s winter/spring hiatus recently experienced two exceptional concerts with distinguished singing at the Davies Symphony Hall.
A fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes
It’s not hard not to feel jaded about Romeo and Juliet.
Garden varieties
Those of us in New York City who relish 17th century Italian vocal music were offered an enticing banquet over the past few weeks.
Diplomatic immunity
Émigré, unfortunately, fails to do justice, either musically or theatrically, to this group of refugees or to the Shanghainese who took them in.
Have a napkin, have a chopstick, have a chair
From a musical perspective, the evening came together admirably. As a work of theater, though, it was as stale as last week’s takeout.
Divine mother
What does it mean to be a “gender transcendent diva?”
Sack of Rome
Finding Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia on the Academy of Vocal Arts calendar was both a pleasure and something of a surprise—the latter because the work is far from central repertoire, even in a conservatory.
Destiny’s child
While you may need to bring along your Dramamine, the Met’s new production of La forza del destino, does—eventually—spin fast enough to achieve escape velocity.
Small but mighty
One of the first things James Conlon did when he took over the reins as Music Director of LA Opera was create the “Recovered Voices” project, producing operas that had been suppressed by the Nazis.
Private tudoring
Anna Bolena is one of the many works by Donizetti which, after their modern recovery in the second part of the last century, have both never fully left the stage while simultaneously never becoming a repertoire staple Lucia di Lammermoor or L’elisir d’amore.
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).