Performance Reviews
Reviews of operatic, vocal, and classical performances at the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, all across America, and around the world.
Reviews of operatic, vocal, and classical performances at the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, all across America, and around the world.
In his attempts to be clever, and to overstuff Leopoldstadt with a dictionary’s worth of marginalia, Tom Stoppard never lingers on a character or storyline long enough to develop it into something worth caring about.
Cost of Living, the Pulitzer Prize–winning play by Martyna Majok now on Broadway, overflows with complexity. It begins with the title.
Whoever thought Verdi’s Il trovatore needed an injection of humor to make it complete?
Gianandrea Noseda leads seasoned Wagnerians in Andreas Homoki’s stark production of Die Walküre for Zurich Opera.
David McVicar’s 2017 production of Tosca returned to the Met on Tuesday night, with an able and watchable, if not transcendent cast.
People turn up at a cancer hospital on the worst day of their lives. In I’m Revolting, a moving and often unsettling world premiere from Atlantic Theatre Company, playwright Gracie Gardner dissects the fears and motivations of patients and their caregivers with surgical precision.
Yuval Sharon at Boston Lyric Opera has brilliantly found an interpretative middle ground for La bohème by presenting the acts in reverse order.
Both the mise-en-scène and the musical direction amplified the absolute worst tendencies of the Opéra Comique’s Lakmé in the most tasteless and baffling ways.
Michael Spyres’s nobly moving Idomeneo wasn’t just a bravura triumph: singing strongly throughout, he brought more colors to his portrayal of the tortured king than I had experienced from others in the Ponnelle production.
It’s nasty world, Shostakovich seems to say, where life alternates between boring and terrifying.
Director Barrie Kosky brings to Fiddler on the Roof fascinating ideas, fine casting, equal mixes of comedy and sadness, and, from the beginning, a sense for we of the audience that we were about to spend three hours in very good hands.
Sondra Radvanovsky has an unconventional voice that is suited to unconventional characters and is best used in rangy, difficult music. The lack of lush beauty was no deficit in depicting Medea’s jealousy and vengeful rage.
A troika of operas by Rachmaninoff: Aleko , The Miserly Knight and Francesca da Rimini , courtesy of Odyssey Opera.
Robert Carsen‘s legendary production of Eugene Onegin finally arrives in San Francisco.
For the season opener, Opera San José decided to explore the class conflict central to Le nozze di Figaro by transporting the opera to India, specifically during the British Raj.
With the phenomenal cast that stacked Paris Opera’s production of I Capuleti e i Montecchi , it was easy to overlook the quirks of Bellini’s opera and get lost in the pleasures of glorious bel canto singing.
Rodrigo is a ball-breaking role, but Lawrence Brownlee makes the demands sound easy—tossing in additional high notes and audaciously decorating cabalettas as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
My impression was of a very fine singer performing a role that was slightly too large for him.
Festival O is back, and the sense of joy and expectation was palpable among the audience and Opera Philadelphia staff, who chatted together as we awaited the start of The Raven.
Emily D’Angelo, in a moment of subversion, sang the entire program wearing casual trousers, a vest, and chunky combat boots, her cropped hair slightly mussed, and wearing only light make-up.
Surrounded by security and greeted by a bevy of cameras, Su Majestad la Reina Sofía brought a bit of excitement to an evening that didn’t end up being all that musically rewarding.
LA Opera sent out an email warning that the production “contains depictions of blood, violence, and drug use, as well as strobe lights and a gunshot effect in Act III.”
The concert itself—starring Michael Fabiano, Nadine Sierra, Pene Pati and Lucas Meachem—seemed to be a beautiful affair that I would have loved to see it in a person.
Antony and Cleopatra was an auspicious start to San Francisco Opera’s second century, a performance that seems to improve as I continue to think about it.
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.
