Those monsters look like us
“This used to be a funhouse… but now it’s full of evil clowns / It’s time to start the countdown…. I’m gonna burn it down”
Performance Reviews
Reviews of operatic, vocal, and classical performances at the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, all across America, and around the world.
Ghost of honor
The elusive La dame blanche returned for one evening to New York City on May 28 thanks to the New Amsterdam Opera led by maestro Keith Chambers.
Varying the song
The opera The Rake’s Progress, as many people know already, was inspired by a series of engravings and paintings of the same name by William Hogarth, showing the decline of a young man into depravity and insanity.
A faint impression of the genuine article
Can we start by not using Barbra Streisand as a polestar here?
Give Paris one more chance
Pavarotti and Freni are gone but the Franco Zeffirelli Bohème remains.
Ring my bell
The monsoon outside was no match for the torrents of gorgeous, dramatic singing and playing that was unleashed inside George Washington University’s Lisner Hall Sunday afternoon when Washington Concert Opera, in a glorious deluge of Léo Delibes, presented Lakmé to round out its return season.
Spaced out
Before Wednesday I don’t remember gasping when I entered a concert venue.
Somewhere in Egypt
We open in a war room that resembled nothing so much as a parking garage. Amneris’s boudoir was certainly recognizable as such but I’d be hard-pressed to pinpoint the location of the Triumphal Scene other than the inside of a large discothèque.
Reviving a pharaoh
The Met brought back 2019 smash Akhnaten last night, with nearly the exact same cast and creative team, and with nearly the same knockout effect of three years ago.
Resisting the recognizable
It was Matthew Jocelyn’s libretto, with its disorientingly deconstructive approach to its source text, that gave Brett Dean’s Hamlet its identity.
Room temperature
It’s maybe not a surprise that Carmen is neither a good vocal nor temperamental fit for Isabel Leonard.
Mainly in the plain
I wonder why many New Yorkers have been led to believe that the only Handel conductor in the world is Harry Bicket.
Thrust into the political spotlight
The Met’s revival of Turandot on Saturday night was surprisingly contentious.
The end of this play isn’t written
“We came through the Depression by the skin of our teeth! One more tight squeeze like that and where will we be?”
Between the sheets
Ms. Damrau unleashed a Blitzkrieg of charm upon her audience.
Making her garden grown
Joyce DiDonato admits that she is “a problem solver, a dreamer, and—yes I’m a belligerent optimist.”
Stained class
With no disrespect to Nadine Sierra, who as Lucia acquits herself honorably if not magically in vocal terms, the undisputed cause célèbre here is director Simon Stone.
No sex please, we’re German
Why is so twinkling, tuneful a score so little known?
Middle America in caps
This is more than just a revival—it’s a reinvigoration of what I consider to be one of the best works of the last 50 years.
She wants to be a prima donna
Ireland’s Wexford Festival Opera marked its 70th birthday in 2021 by presenting four prima donnas who made important early appearances at the festival in solo recitals across the globe.
Incandescent like some adolescent
She Loves Me can take a beating.
A crazier day
Saturday’s performance of Le nozze di Figaro at the Met mined the humor from Mozart’s divine setting of Beaumarchais’s play about a crazy day in the Almaviva household.
Strangeness of the body
On this past, rainy Thursday, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s delivered a really rather extraordinary performance of the St. Matthew Passion. To me, this evening was a fascinating exploration of work.
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).