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.
We convoke for Dido and Aeneas in an arched tunnel a city block long, lit by candles in the many recesses.
The Wiener Staatsoper commemorated its 150th anniversary with a musically sensational presentation of Richard Strauss’ Die Frau Ohne Schatten.
La Traviata offered a cast of fresh debutantes and an uncommonly strong musical performance that could hardly be bettered.
Tosca, as it exists now, can’t be real, spontaneous drama-it’s just Camp.
Lise Davidsen, the young Norwegian soprano who won the Operalia competition in 2015, makes her debut as a recording artist with the Decca label in a new recital of Wagner and Strauss arias and orchestral songs.
Amore Opera, an old-fashioned, adventurous little company that performs ambitious and sometimes delectably obscure but worthy repertory at the Riverside Theatre, is now (through Sunday) presenting Un ballo in maschera.
The opera proved somewhat puzzling—the score representing more a collage of fragmented and incidental musical ideas, and the libretto a turgid, slow-moving mass of purple prose.
The Canadian Opera Company’s new production of Otello is a collection of welcome returns.
Daniel Thomas Davis’ The Impossible She, was a towering musical achievement, a hugely complex work packing a whopping political and intellectual punch.
There is a deep sense of culmination and finality when we discuss the last works of the great Masters.
Iestyn Davies is, of course, a renowned Handellian, and he sang Handel’s music with clarity, restraint, and precision.
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.
Tell us: What’s your favorite Verdi performance?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
