(A)nything (B)ut (C)armen
Calling from 2066, Brendan Latimer argues that the best way to save opera might be to just blow up the standard repertoire altogether.
Benjamin Britten
89 pieces since 2009 — at 1 company, most often at English Chamber Orchestra.
89
pieces
1
company
18
years
By company
A little tenderness
The premiere recording of David T. Little’s What Belongs to You reveals a work of both tenderness and artistic tenacity.
The poetry is in the pity
Klaus Mäkelä unexpectedly joins the foray for The Cleveland Orchestra‘s performances of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem.
Road shows
Brendan Latimer hitches a ride with members of the “site-responsive opera” movement who are taking their shows out of the opera house — and out of the box.
Follow your bliss
In recital for the Los Angeles Opera, tenor Ben Bliss makes the case for the next stage of his career.
To our glorious dead
The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra offered a rending reading of Britten‘s massive War Requiem with an eclectic trio of soloists.
In the beginning
In Jacopo Peri’s seminal Euridice, the Newberry Consort and Haymarket Opera made a compelling case for putting you in the room where it happened.
What belongs to us
Kevin Ng sits down with PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novelist and critic Garth Greenwell to talk about sex, queerness, and the “promise of opera.”
Da tempeste
My recollections of Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in Louisiana twenty years ago today, come with a pair of odd bookends: it starts with Verdi’s Don Carlo and ends with Puccini’s Il trittico.
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
The Aix factor
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.
Married to the mob
Contrasting approaches to Regie duke it out in Cavalleria rusticana & Pagliacci and Rusalka in Munich
This summer I’m reading The Uncle from Rome
Joseph Caldwell produced this charming tale from a year spent in Italy on the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
By John Yohalem
22 comments
Neither fish nor fowl
Nigel Wilkinson reviews Kris Defoort‘s kaleidoscopic, unsettling new opera in Brussels.
Unnecessary performance problems
Patrick Mack on the iconic Ethan Mordden‘s career and his first book on opera in 30 years – and it appears that time has mostly stopped in the Mordden manse.
Witchery and bitchery
Double double, toil and trouble, y’all, and happy spooky season from Slaylem. (It’s like Salem, but fun.)
Broken branching out
Karim Sulayman’s intentions are to demonstrate links and roots, in themes musical and poetic, crossing every boundary of culture, religion, nationality, genre.
Sack of Rome
Finding Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia on the Academy of Vocal Arts calendar was both a pleasure and something of a surprise—the latter because the work is far from central repertoire, even in a conservatory.
Being beauteous
With its sumptuous wood paneling, frescoed ceilings, and various Gilded Age trappings, the Park Avenue Armory’sBoard of Officers Room certainly is not a bad place to spend Valentine’s Day—even better when it plays host to equally sumptuous music-making.
I’ll remember April
If April is the cruelest month, it may be that spring’s arrival brings far too many things to do and see.
I shall be released
Welcome, beloveds, to the Jessye Norman Memorial Museum. I’ll be the docent for your tour today.
The beautiful and damned
On this day in 1965 Montserrat Caballé and Sherrill Milnes made their Metropolitan Opera debuts in Faust.
“The work by which I stand or fall”
Dame Ethel Smyth’s third opera, The Wreckers, opened at Houston Grand Opera on October 28 and runs through November 11.
The clue whose meaning we avoid
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.