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.
Over the past two decades, the understatedly beguiling Sasha Cooke has inched chronologically inwards in her subtle conquest of swathes of mezzo concert repertoire.
By an astounding coincidence, on Monday night Handel’s third and fourth extant operas were being performed simultaneously across the street from each other at Lincoln Center.
Donizetti’s La Favorite remains a relative rarity in the repertoire, especially in the original French version.
The success of Porgy and Bess at the Met forced bass-baritone Eric Owens, the newly installed director of vocal studies at the Curtis Institute, to cancel a long-planned afternoon recital at the school on February 16.
Saturday’s performance of Così fan tutte demonstrated that even the cool, acerbic wit of Mozart’s most controversial comedy can warm our hearts in these icy winter months.
Winter weather has taken a toll on the cast of Lyric Opera of Chicago’s revival of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.
Do we do what we have to do? Or do we have to do what we do?
On the day of the Super Bowl, I attended a near-sold-out screening of the Paris Opéra’s recent production of Rameau’s 1735 opéra-ballet Les Indes galantes at New York’s Alliance Française.
It’s 2020, Ivo’s the new Ethel Merman, and I caught a preview of his fourth Broadway show and first Broadway musical, West Side Story.
Handel’s biting Agrippina finally arrived at the Metropolitan Opera Thursday evening 310 years after its Venetian premiere.
Is there any opera more bullet-proof than Le Nozze di Figaro?
Pretty is its own reward.
Wednesday night’s New York Philharmonic concert was a high-stakes performance for a number of reasons.
It is rare to be moved to tears by a lieder recital. It is rarer still to be moved to tears by the third song on a recital program.
In Winterreise, Peter Mattei’s persona is burly and brusque, a sarcastic introvert, full of contempt for his romantic weaknesses with squalls of anger and lyrical reflection by turns.
I’ve heard starrier performances, but none that made a more powerful case for this masterwork.
Michael Spyres as Faust, despite a few flickers of indisposition, was nearly ideal.
A special program note for Saturday night’s performance of Matthew Aucoin’s new opera Eurydice pointed to a rare convergence of three MacArthur Grant fellows in its creation and staging.
Elina Garanca’s glorious Marguerite transformed La Damnation de Faust into the Met’s first essential must-see of the year.
We live in a time of open-season for jokes on ancient myths, mixing and matching, sometimes with great success, as The Book of Mormon and Hadestown demonstrate.
Ultimately, the unrelenting grimness of the subject matter allied to the sameness of the vocal writing made for a wearying evening.
Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Bolero is a dance-music-theater piece that Prototype Festival presented at the Joyce Theater through Saturday night.
I watched Greta Gerwig’s heartbreaking, gorgeous, joy-filled explosion of an adaptation of Little Women in about the best way one can, sniffling in the dark with my best friend, the closest person I have to a sister.
The opera’s radical vision lay in its enormous scale, which encompassed a hundred-strong community chorus taken from the ranks of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and Master Voices.
Tell us: What’s your favorite Verdi performance?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
