Before any music-making happened, there were clear signs of success. One of the earliest and most daring initiatives of Opera Philadelphia’s new regime led by Anthony Roth Costanzo has been a “Pick Your Price” program, with opera tickets available for as little as $11.

At the opening night performance of their Don Giovanni, the Academy of Music was as packed as we’ve ever seen it, with many young people in the audience. When ARC himself took to the stage, the crowd cheered. When he announced that literally the entire season was sold out, they cheered louder.

With this energetic rush, we were off to the races »

What do a 9-year-old opera adapted from a psychological film and a 170-year-old opera based on medieval legend have in common? One answer: Sex and miracles. Another: they’re both can’t-miss productions at Houston Grand Opera (HGO) right now.

Missy Mazzoli has established herself as one of contemporary opera’s most skilled and subtle architects of emotional response, and her latest, The Listeners—now at the Lyric Opera of Chicago—was no exception.

Philly, Houston, Chicago… the Parterre private jet (not pictured/real) has been sending up and touching down all over America lately.

But there’s just so MUCH to TOUCH abroad!

Don Carlos returned to the Opéra National de Paris, and it was an unusually happy occasion. So how were Charles Castronovo as Don Carlos, Marina Rebeka as Elisabeth, and Christian Van Horn as Philip?

Well don’t ask me; I wasn’t there.

But Nigel Wilkinson reports that on this, his third viewing of the Krzysztof Warlikowski production, it “had matured, if such can be said, into something thoroughly sound and deeply satisfying: a genuine repertory production.”

Loving him isn’t the right thing to do Matthew Travisano takes on Mimì’s Act III aria from La bohème — not that one, the other one — in the latest installment of the “Perspectives on an Aria” series

A favorite Donizetti performance from Angela Meade For soprano Angela Meade, Donizetti’s operas are all about the mad scenes.
Patrick Mack 1964-2025 parterre box is very sad to learn of the passing of beloved writer Patrick Mack in Los Angeles yesterday.
Propheten im Podcast Chris’s Cache highlights the erstwhile Chicago Symphony Orchestra @ Carnegie series with not one but two starry operas conducted by Georg Solti: Salome with Birgit Nilsson and a performance of Moses und Aron	Sir Georg Solti and Birgit Nilsson study the score for Richard Strauss’s Salome in Chicago in December 1974 (Terry’s Photography. Courtesy of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association’s Rosenthal Archives)

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Ciao for now!
Nick Scholl
Publisher, parterre box