The brew that is true
This is an exuberant, uplifting, and joyous Elisir, and, for once, it was actually laugh-out-loud funny.
Ailyn Pérez
42 pieces since 2013 — in 22 roles, at 11 companies, most often at Metropolitan Opera.
42
pieces
22
roles
11
companies
14
years
By role
Role Adina
Role Alice
Radically giddy
Verdi’s Falstaff is a brilliantly written opera: funny, with a complex ability to operate across minutely shifting registers of farce and lyricism. It needs, ideally, a production and cast capable of executing both comedy and drama, irony and sincerity—often concurrently. In its current Met revival, happily, Falstaff has everything it needs.
Role Alice Ford
Kitchen confidential
Since 1985, from the Chicago Symphony at Carnegie Hall to the Welsh National Opera visiting BAM and from Chicago Lyric to New York City Opera to the Met, I’ve never encountered a bad Falstaff—or one that didn’t astound and delight me.
Role Blanche de la Force
Pragmatism and ideology
It doesn’t get more classic than John Dexter‘s Dialogues des Carmélites.
Role Cio-Cio San
Cavalcade of stars
Back-to-back casts in the Metropolitan Opera’s revivals of Madama Butterfly and La traviata offer ample opportunity for soprano-gazing.
Faith in their hands shall snap in two
Franz Welser-Möst leads a rigorous, if emotionally staid, performance of Verdi‘s Requiem at Carnegie Hall.
Erste Brautnacht
Nearly three years after the premiere of François Girard’s Lohengrin at the Met, Parterre Box looks back at the production with a duet from Piotr Beczala and Elena Stikhina.
Tuckered out
This Sunday marked a muted return of the Richard Tucker Foundation Gala, which had the dubious distinction of the fourth edition not to feature a prizewinner and perhaps the first not to provide complete orchestral and choral accompaniment for its performers.
Role Countess Almaviva
Marriage is what brings us together today
Le nozze di Figaro in Santa Fe is a light and kindly revival while The Turn of the Screw is crisp and atmospheric
Role Donna Anna
Behind closed doors
Mozart appears to find promiscuity a source of humor rather than something that is a fundamental problem.
Role Elvira
Dishonored in the breach
Uneven operas, like Verdi’s Ernani, which just recently finished its Scala run, more often work as theatre on the micro level than the macro.
Role Florencia Grimaldi
Let the river run
In its Met premier, neither a talented cast nor some beautiful musical moments were enough to make Florencia feel new or vital.
Role Juliette
Speaking ill of the dead
Plácido Domingo’s conducting reduced the score’s urgency to the lethargy of a jellyfish.
Role Leonora
Basque in the glory
For the opening night of Il Trovatore, Houston Grand Opera’s new production aimed high, bringing together a star-studded cast and a fresh, contemporary take on Verdi’s intense drama.
Role Marguerite
Sealing the deal
The Bayerische Staatsoper’s summer festival wound down with Lotte de Beer’s darkly effective production of Gounod ’sFaust.
Reframing
The production is at all times visually arresting, but it’s also extremely distracting.
Role Micaëla
On the road again
When it premiered at the Opéra Comique in 1875, Carmen shocked audiences with its frank depictions of female sexuality, the proletariat, and violence: subjects that have ensured the piece’s continued relevance and that have inspired numerous retellings and revisions.
Role Mimì
Sick and tired
Before this weekend, I never thought I would want to leave an opera by Act I. The recent production of Puccini’s La bohème at the Lyric Opera of Chicago taught me that there’s a first time for everything.
A Christmas story
This archly traditional production of La bohème was a little shaky on opening night. It nevertheless had a full complement of sterling individual performances to take us on home.
We’ll always have Paris
At Friday night’s performance of La Bohème at the Met, the cast seemed to lean into (and gamble upon) the production’s enduring popularity.
You give me fever
Mortality is ugly—it smells, it makes uncomfortable noises, it takes its time; and then there is the overwhelming sense of dread and helplessness.
Role Musetta
Embroidered silk
Maria Agresta‘s delicately-acted, sumptuously-sung seamstress transformed what might have been just an average Wednesday night revival into something finer.
Role Nedda
Married to the mob
Contrasting approaches to Regie duke it out in Cavalleria rusticana & Pagliacci and Rusalka in Munich
Role Rusalka
Empty chairs
The fourth production of Santa Fe Opera’s 66th Festival Season that opened on Saturday June 22 offered a multitude of firsts.
Role Tatiana
Through different eyes
I was reminded at the Met’s season premiere of Eugene Onegin Friday night always to expect the unexpected.
Role Thaïs
Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes
A wonderfully committed Ailyn Pérez and Gerald Finley at Saturday afternoon’s revival abetted by Emmanuel Villaume’s passionate conducting converted me to a Thaïs believer.
Role Tosca
On the edge of my seat
The San Francisco Opera became the first US opera company to present a full-blown production indoors on its home turf this season when they ushered the US opera audience into 2021-22 Season on Saturday September 21 with a stellar performance of Giacomo Puccini’s perennial favorite Tosca.
Role Violetta
Conspicuous consumption
On Thursday evening, the Teatro alla Scala audience didn’t watch the familiar presentation of a “wayward woman” who overcomes moral inferiority only to be robbed of happiness when she finally deserved it.
Win a Free Ticket to Opening Night at the Met!
Quinn Kelsey and Lise Davidsen star in the Met's new Macbeth. We're giving away one ticket, so screw your courage to the sticking place and enter now!
I’ll take the fall
The days are getting shorter, but you can keep the prattle going this fall’s Talk of the Town! You will, you can, you must join in the discussion about: Great mezzo soprano performances (October),
Gained in translation (November), Teleport me back to… (December).
