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.
For more than 40 years, the magnificent opening image from Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites has served as an icon for the Met.
The New York premiere of Kopernikus, an opera by the Canadian mystic Claude Vivier, who was murdered in Paris in 1983, three years after its completion.
Even the hit songs in this early Jule Styne musical would recede in a better show.
New Amsterdam Opera specializes in American singers whose abilities are as yet little known.
At the Metropolitan Opera’s Götterdämmerung on Saturday afternoon, the fires which consumed the Gods burned lukewarm.
Stefan Vinke’s Siegfried was not so much brawny and terrestrial, but heady and mercurial
Ivo van Hove really seems to be everywhere lately.
Michael Mayer‘s production of La traviata at the Met is so timid, so devoid of insight, so cynically pandering and gaudy that I hardly feel like it even matters what I think of the performances of the current cast.
One needs liberty in order to be a libertine.
Trial by Jury was the operetta chosen by Lamplighters Music Theatre, the San Francisco-based Gilbert & Sullivan company, to close their 66th season.
We owe director John Doyle and Classic Stage Company a debt of gratitude for bringing Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock—warts and all—to the stage.
The finals on Sunday seemed a bit like the modern-day operatic equivalent of the Roman colosseum.
At the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday night, Mozart’s opera never sounded fresher, a superstar cast shining new light on one of the composer’s all-too-seldom-performed scores.
Frankly, I can’t imagine there’s a future for I Married an Angel.
Die Walküre crystallizes the cycle’s questions, ideas, and stakes.
Saturday night, Lyric Opera of Chicago gave us a wonderful evening of vocalism in honoring Renée Fleming’s 25th anniversary at Lyric.
Kiss Me Kate is a sophisticated soufflé of a show: a comedy of manners, requiring effortless verve and elegance in the playing.
Amore Opera, one of New York’s smaller opera companies, is presenting the first local run of Dinorah, ou le Pardon de Ploërmel since before the war.
Teatro Real continued their 200 years’ celebration by premiering a piece that they have never done before, Francesco Cavalli’s opera La Calisto.
I’ve never liked the term “crossover.”
Soprano Iulia Isaev proved to be in just about every way a lovely Tosca.
Austin McCormack‘s lascivious choreography outshone a tepid and tedious staging of Saint-Saëns’s old-testament epic.
Is there any opera that can take more of a beating while still making an impact than Eugene Onegin?
It’s difficult to reconcile what Schlather writes with what we see onstage, which is a jumble not only of pianos, but of periods and concepts.
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.
