Jacquelyn Stucker talks to Kevin Ng about repertoire, tearing down the Fach system, and what it takes to make music from baroque to George Benjamin her own.
An uneven new cast can’t dim the glow of Richard Eyre‘s incisive Le nozze di Figaro at the Met
Instead of giving laurels to a performance already praised since a long time, my choice will be Don Giovanni, Metropolitan Opera, May 2023.
Opera took center stage on the final weekend of the Philadelphia Orchestra season.
It’s autumn in New York, baby.
Like a sommelier of male entitlement, Peter Mattei paired with precision moves from a wide-ranging vocabulary of gesture.
We watch Peter Grimes being made into a deviant— a process that can take place through the mechanism of the law, but often happens outside of it through social processes.
Saturday’s performance of Le nozze di Figaro at the Met mined the humor from Mozart’s divine setting of Beaumarchais’s play about a crazy day in the Almaviva household.
While it must be admitted that Elza van den Heever doesn’t have an ideally warm and agile Handel voice, she evidenced fierce control over her instrument and skillfully built a powerful portrait of the courageous Rodelida fighting for her survival.
Despite having lost its announced Cherubino, conductor and Count (the latter in the midst of rehearsals), the season premiere of Le Nozze di Figaro Saturday afternoon proved to be one of the most enjoyable Met Mozart performances I’ve attended in ages.
Is there any opera more bullet-proof than Le Nozze di Figaro?
Saturday afternoon’s performance of Le Nozze di Figaro at the Met was awash with contradictions.
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.
One needs liberty in order to be a libertine.
As Despina in the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Così fan tutte, Kelli O’Hara injects much needed vitality into an otherwise lethargic evening.
It was odd, if not downright uncomfortable, to watch Le Nozze di Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera.
A performance of Gluck’s Alceste from Wiener Staatsoper in June 2016.
As portrayed by Vittorio Grigolo, Nemorino was a manic self-absorbed, probably bipolar, stalker who—against all odds and good sense—gets the poor girl.
No surprises this week: back to normal with what is perhaps the world’s most favorite opera: Puccini’s La bohème.
The 19th century could not cope with Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti (Thus Do They All, or The School for Lovers) with a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte and music by Mozart, first presented in Vienna in 1790.
That’s what it must have been like in 1726 London when Handel composed Alessandro for perhaps the three most famous (and expensive) singers of the day.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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