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.
Are Beethoven’s symphonies overplayed? Yes, but for a reason. While this justification may sound cliché, Beethoven’s humanist universalism is a sentiment that feels urgent in an era of widespread polarization and pessimism.
Despite the practically unmitigated fiasco of the last Verdi concert opera performance seen in Boston, I approached Sunday’s Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras performance of Don Carlo at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre with much more optimism.
John Yohalem reports from the New York Dramatic Voices performance of Act III of Die Walküre
Though I’ve sometimes complained that the Paris Opera, while supposedly short of cash, changes its productions nearly as often as the rest of us change our socks, André Engel’s Cunning Little Vixen first appeared there 17 years ago. At the time it was billed as ‘new’, though it actually dates back further still, to 2000 at the Lyon Opera. I saw it when it arrived at the Bastille and wrote it up at the time.
Christopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleischmann‘s opera at the Prototype Festival re-sets Rashomon in the Pacific Northwest and binds its characters into a hellish cycle of violence with a dark, hypnotic score
In 2011, Sondra Radvanovsky‘s Tosca proved promising; fourteen years later, it was absolutely magnificent, a completely satisfying musical and dramatic embodiment of a challenging role by an artist at the peak of her powers.
In the “tormented writers’” room, two actors in goth makeup and bride-of-Frankenstein wigs are clacking on typewriters and throwing crumpled papers on the floor.
The New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players are celebrating their 50th Anniversary Season presenting Ruddigore (last month), The Pirates of Penzance (first two weekends in January), and Iolanthe (on its way in April).
In Munich, performances by 97-year-old Herbert Blomstedt and 32-year-old Thomas Guggeis show the city’s orchestral ensembles at their best
Eat the Document, which premiered at the Prototype Festival last week, compresses a decades-long, nonlinear story into a swift 90 minutes while still finding time to pause for reflection.
David Fox and Cameron Kelsall take on a new revival of Gypsy: Is there any gayer or more impassioned theater topic?
Apologies in advance to Key’mon Murrah, whose rather extraordinary Marian Anderson award recital with pianist Brian Zeger at the Kennedy Center on December 17 demands some general musing.
Despite not being very happy with the state of the world (and the union) and not looking forward to the New Year, this past December I took in many festive holiday offerings including a pair of oratorios.
I had been hopeful that 2024 would end, if not on a high note, then one that was at least in tune.
What can you say, other than that everything was fab?
There are two problems to address – problems of the sort the arts thrive on addressing.
While the Met’s Mozart-lite holiday production of The Magic Flute kept the eyes entertained with spectacular sets and costumes, the scattershot casting and lack of musical seriousness dragged down this opera for beginners.
If song recitals by opera stars Piotr Beczala and Asmik Grigorian sometimes came up short, Semyon Bychkov’s powerful rendition of the Glagolitic Mass instantly became one of the year’s highlights.
Last Thursday evening, pure virtuosity was on display at the Veterans’ Room of the Park Avenue Armory, courtesy of soprano Barbara Hannigan and pianist Bertrand Chamayou.
It was, at least, a jolly good show. Whether or not it actually suited Stravinsky’s music or Auden and Kallman’s text, is another question.
The court of Mantua has run away to join the circus; Washington, DC and Baltimore’s experimental opera company, IN Series, transformed Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto in a new production set under the big top this winter.
Back to Brussels last Sunday for my third new opera of the season (after The Time of our Singing, also at La Monnaie, and Picture a day like this, at the Opéra Comique): Mikael Karlsson’s Fanny and Alexander, with a libretto by Royce Vavrek.
American opera and its institutions are experiencing an identity crisis. Nowhere is this clearer than in Tazewell Thompson and Jeanine Tesori’s Blue.
Here’s the bottom line: at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall stage on December 3, Iestyn Davies and viol consort Fretwork made the sweetest sounds I’ve heard from human beings all year.
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.
