The Bronx Opera‘s Ariadnes auf Naxos is well worth the subway ride. Plus, two strong premieres at the Brooklyn Art Song Society.
Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder and Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot are, in their different ways, the final decadent flowering of a musical tradition at its twilight.
On Site Opera’s Turn of the Screw, an immersive production set in the Bronx’s Wave Hill Gardens, featured mostly good singing and a few directorial and technological missteps.
A dozen women or more talk and sing about all sort of important and exciting things, with “a man” near the bottom of their list of priorities.
Breaking the Waves is not only a “real opera,” it is an immensely powerful work of music drama.
Ambiguity. That’s the theme of the operas of Benjamin Britten (ennobled as Baron Britten of Aldeburgh).
André Previn‘s A Streetcar Named Desire, with the “People’s Diva” herself in the iconic role of the unstable Blanche DuBois.
In any narrative, the unmentioned—the unmentionable—will always be more alarming than that which is carefully described.
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