Festival d’Aix-en-Provence confronts the living and the dead — and its own future — through audacious productions and an intimate world premiere.
Supported by an ingenious production and strong performances, Antonia Bembo’s Ercole Amante makes a successful Paris Opera debut.
Gregory Spears, whose newest opera Sleepers Awake opens this week at Opera Philadelphia, is reviving Romanticism
Ten years since the death of countertenor Brian Asawa, Charles Stanton remembers his friend and corrects the record on his untimely passing.
Ahead of his first season as the Music & Artistic Director of the New York Philharmonic, how much longer can — and should — Gustavo Dudamel stay quiet about the situation in his native Venezuela?
John Danaher on the world-premiere recording of Clémence de Grandval‘s wild and worthy Mazeppa, the latest release from the operatic archaeologists at Palazzetto Bru Zane.
Les Arts Florissants present two ravishing programs in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Kevin Ng sits down with PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novelist and critic Garth Greenwell to talk about sex, queerness, and the “promise of opera.”
This summer’s festival, taking place amid record high temperatures and in the wake of its artistic director, Pierre Audi, featured a disquietingly zeigeisty focus on sexual violence.
We may all be armchair Handelians, but some of us are more used to it than others.
Director R.B. Schlather deftly walks a porous boundary, casting this primordial paroxysm of Germanness as a dialogue between its naïve and moralistic narrative with its outsized legacy.
Over the course of 700 pages, Alex Ross exhaustively—and sometimes exhaustingly—examines an impact that began in the Wagner’s own lifetime and continues unbroken today, with references cropping up in contemporary works as different as The Matrix and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
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.
Wagner’s Ring is an artistic masterpiece that is peerless in its ability to continually reveal layers of musical, theatrical, and philosophical insight
Handel’s Radamisto returned to New York when Opera Lafayette movingly performed this early masterpiece.
“The heavens are telling” begins the famous chorus that ends the first section of The Creation.
I hardly know where to heap my praise first.
I had my head in my hands groaning in disbelief instead of joining in the general applause around me.
There are two delights here: a delectable score too rarely heard and an introduction at close quarters to half a dozen young singers ready for takeoff, indeed already flying.
Published in 1975, James McCourt’s novel Mawrdew Czgowchwz is engaged with a longing for the divine.
Capriccio was a great pleasure on Friday night, March 4. This was a co-production of Opera Philadelphia and The Curtis Institute, presented in the intimate Pearlman Theater at the Kimmel Center.
With February 14th falling on a Sunday, there will be no Valentine’s Day Met performance this year.
If Frank Castorf‘s work on Der Ring des Nibelungen at Bayreuth accomplishes nothing else, it should serve as a sort of loud disorganized reminder of the dangers of indulging in the intentional fallacy.
“Opera News, 76 years old and one of the leading classical music magazines in the country, said on Monday that it would stop reviewing the Metropolitan Opera, a policy prompted by the Met’s dissatisfaction over negative critiques.”
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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