Barrie Kosky’s zany production of The Nose time-steps back onto the Komische Oper Berlin stage.
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.
Big voices overwhelm Claus Guth‘s toothless staging of Khovanshchina at the Berlin Staatsoper.
Bay Area audiences starved for vocal fare during its opera’s winter/spring hiatus recently experienced two exceptional concerts with distinguished singing at the Davies Symphony Hall.
Boston Symphony Orchestra recently confirmed an infinitely renewable contract upon Andris Nelsons, its music director since 2014. To understand why, one needed little more evidence than the outfit’s recent visit to Carnegie Hall.
Trove Thursday offers Shostakovich’s 1962 Katerina Izmailova with Australian soprano Marie Collier as its anti-heroine and Jon Vickers as her lover.
“Trove Thursday” escapes to an exotic place with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko.
It would be generous to say that history comes alive on the operatic stage.
Bare Opera, the feisty little company that gave Debussy’s exquisite L’Enfant Prodigue in Chelsea last spring, is now operating in chic, rundown Bushwick where so many original enterprises sprout.
I can’t think of another 20th century opera which has grown so fast in popularity so long after its composition than Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
My memory is fading but the events I recall most vividly of the last season seem largely to have been concert performances.
Throw in a trio of murders and a healthy splash of vodka and you have, more or less, the plot of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
Zofia Posmysz spent two years as a prisoner in Auschwitz—and she’s still alive and standing pretty tall, in New York for the Lincoln Center Festival God bless her.
My mailbox is filled with cards and letters, all asking the same question: “Croche, is there a classical music angle to the escalating conflict in Crimea?” My answer is: “Indeed there is!”
The life of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is almost as melodramatic as that of its heroine. Composed in the early 1930’s, the opera was well received at its 1934 Leningrad premiere, and was also a success in Moscow a couple of years later. Then one evening Stalin came to see it and…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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