Music Director Eun Sun Kim is at the center of the repertory, and a long Wagner arc is now officially underway
A muted production challenges a talented cast in San Francisco Opera’s Idomeneo
Chris’s Cache follows up its Gounod R&J installment with a widely varied quintet of additional Romeos and Juliets
Final opera of the season. Little-known opera. A revival. So, you can probably skip it, right?
On June 20, a rather breezy, pleasant cool summer evening, the soprano Gabriella Reyes, tenor René Barbera and baritone Will Liverman took over the Summerstage space with a wide-ranging, ambitious recital program with Dimitri Dover tickling the ivories.
Rodrigo is a ball-breaking role, but Lawrence Brownlee makes the demands sound easy—tossing in additional high notes and audaciously decorating cabalettas as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
In their realization of Alcina, Harry Bicket and his ensemble recreated a dramatically vivid and musically nuanced character study out of the opera’s central figures.
You’d think after nearly 40 years of opera going I’d have seen almost everything.. .twice. Yet I found myself at LA Opera Tuesday night for a special presentation of George Frideric Handel’s Alcina which was my first live experience with one of his operas.
Opera Philadelphia Channel invites viewers to revisit a 2015 production of La Traviata, captured on the Academy of Music stage, that’s notable for Lisette Oropesa’s debut as Violetta Valéry.
“Once upon a time / Lived a foolish king. / Mocking Death, his crime, / Pure chaos he bring.”
As long as women have been preyed upon, Don Giovanni has been relevant.
As we also saw last year, Festival O19 ended on a sweetly quiet note, movingly connecting Opera Philadelphia with the larger city and our musical future.
Kudos to Opera Philadelphia for programming Handel’s Semele in its exceptionally interesting and wide-ranging Festival 2019; unfortunately, despite an extraordinary cast, James Darrah’s drably dull production doomed it.
With the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Candide, they saved the best (of all possible worlds) for last.
We convoke for Dido and Aeneas in an arched tunnel a city block long, lit by candles in the many recesses.
I mean, how often does one get to hear Bernstein’s gorgeous, rollicking, and varied score nursed by a full orchestra and the artistic resources of an opera company?
Die Meistersinger is a bold stroke of programming, in a not particularly exciting way.
Lisette Oropesa sang “The Lost One”—the meaning of “traviata.”
I would love to contribute a top ten list but I didn’t even go to ten things this year.
Christopher Alden‘s production of Handel’s Partenope is so erudite and theatrically audacious and also such a rollicking ride, it’s hard to believe it isn’t crap.
It appears that Mariame Clément’s conception of Don Pasquale is that the opera should be retitled Malatesta.
Giovanni Simone Mayr was one of the most important musical figures of his day, a man Rossini referred to as the “father of Italian opera” whom Napoleon personally lobbied to come work in Paris. Though he wrote nearly 70 operas and taught Donizetti and Bellini, the Bavarian-born composer had the misfortune of hitting his peak…
They want it. The career. They want it really bad. So we learn from Susan Froemke’s Metropolitan Opera-commissioned documentary about the participants in the final round of the 2007 MetNational Council Auditions, which is out on DVD this month. Our own doyenne reviewed the film when it was screened as an HD theatrical event, and…
Simply everyone chimes in today about Monday night’s Met in the Parks recital at Central Park SummerStage. JJ has one take, Anthony Tommasini quite another, and for depth of detail, you need look no further than Our Own Sanford:
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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