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.
Opéra Royal revives Grétry’s Richard Cœur-de-lion, one of the finest examples of the opéra comique genre.
Sunday evening Los Angeles Opera presented tenor Javier Camarena in recital to a wildly enthusiastic audience from the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
How does one make a performance of standard opera repertoire like Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro feel “fresh?”
My first-ever Met Sunday opera brought the welcome return of Gluck’s sublime Orfeo ed Euridice in an enchanting afternoon that combined elegant conducting, joyous dancing and Jamie Barton’s extraordinary hero.
Christian Gerhaher delivers a Kindertotenlieder of such conciliatory tact that it erases all others.
I find it difficult to experience Madama Butterfly without also experiencing an odd fracturing of the self.
At the Park Avenue Armory, Barbara Hannigan chose to sing works that tested her metal in odd corners of vocalism.
In El Barbero de Sevilla, as given through the weekend by the New Camerata Opera, there is far too much comic dialogue, all of it in English and none of it sparkling.
Hannah Lash’s latest opera, which premiered at the Miller Theater on Wednesday night, was a musical and dramatic misfire.
Little Shop of Horrors loses its necessary edge when it’s wrested from the gritty world of its creation.
A sense of celebration was definitely in the air last Thursday at the Vienna State Opera.
An opera company presenting a Broadway musical that centers around a woman of a certain age travelling to Italy with her young daughter might seem more a vehicle for a great diva of a certain age.
Luisa Miller snowballs toward disaster and death.
When soprano Yihan Duan started to sing her aria, you could feel an almost electric charge that something special was happening.
The Paris Opera assembled an all-French cast to stage arguably the most well-known example of opéra-ballet, Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes.
There were plenty of Turan-do’s and only a few Turandon’ts at the Met’s Turandot Sunday afternoon.
I can’t think of an opera this year that I’ve enjoyed as much as Tuesday’s Met Macbeth, thanks especially to the smashing house debut of Italian soprano Anna Pirozzi as its blazing Madame M.
The opening night of the Canadian Opera Company’s 2019-20 season was all about the Wilsons.
It’s an old chestnut of a joke that applies even more to opera than to the theatre: A veteran actor is on his deathbed.
As we also saw last year, Festival O19 ended on a sweetly quiet note, movingly connecting Opera Philadelphia with the larger city and our musical future.
As the Netrebko-crowned Macbeth took to the stage at the Met, just a few blocks away, Teatro Grattacielo presented its 25th Anniversary Gala Concert.
I’m certain I wasn’t the only one thrilled to bits to see LA Opera’s production of La Bohème finally retired after 26 years and seven mountings.
Erwartung and Bluebeard’s Castle returned to Lincoln Center Thursday night in a musically scintillating if theatrically mild double-bill by the New York Philharmonic.
A brace of Handel operas at the George Enescu International Festival.
Tell us: What’s your favorite Verdi performance?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
