Doublet trouble
A messy new I puritani at the Met is a historic and historical disappointment.
Donald Palumbo
24 pieces since 2008 — at 2 companies, most often at Metropolitan Opera.
24
pieces
2
companies
19
years
A favorite Wagner performance from Roger Pines
I’d never heard Götterdämmerung in a live performance until 1985 at The Dallas Opera. OMG, so long ago!
By Roger Pines
58 comments
Höchste Lust!
Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads the Philadelphia Orchestra, Stuart Skelton, and Nina Stemme in a Tristan und Isolde for the ages
Think of the children
One of the highlights, if not the highlight, of No-Met-February was an all-Ravel evening presented by the Juilliard Orchestra.
Playing in the rafters
Opera took center stage on the final weekend of the Philadelphia Orchestra season.
Miracle on 64th Street
Only connect! So sayeth E.M. Forster (via Margaret Wilcox) in Howard’s End.
Turn and face the strange
How appropriate that the Met should present this supposedly “Jewish” opera after many in the audience had just spent twelve days immersed in the genuine article over the High Holy Days.
Tremens factus sum ego
One got a sense that the Met and the maestro directed most of the rehearsal and preparation toward the opening night premiere of the Heggie opus
Die Frist ist Glum
This Holländer offers neither a clear narrative vision for the work nor a sense of turbocharged drama; it simply sits on the Met’s cavernous stage as a dull gray mass.
A hole new world
Here’s an update for those keeping up with the Lohengrin casting sweepstakes at the Met.
All I cared about was Bess
Opera’s latest superstar, Angel Blue, in a compleat and enthralling portrayal, gloriously sung and rivetingly acted.
Better call Gaul
Bellini’s Norma Monday evening didn’t at all improve on the production it was replacing.
Fifty shades of gold
Anticipation of events like the Metropolitan Opera’s 50th Anniversary bash turns me back into the newly opera-soused kid who begged his parents to let him watch the highlights of the Bing Gala on the family color television.
Reunited
There is much to say about the similarities between the plot of Fidelio and the ancient myth of Orpheus.
Conversion narrative
Blood-and-guts singing is the reason to see Nabucco at the Metropolitan Opera this season.
Mark, missed
Thoughtless direction stifled the epic drama.
Red queen
Joyce DiDonato is taking her Mary Stuart on the road, so to speak.
No business like snow business
Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is his masterwork and its themes of social convention and unrequited longing surely struck a deep chord in a composer who, in late 19th century Russia, was gay and had to conduct himself carefully.
Wigs and weaves
It’s easiest to write reviews when there are soaring triumphs and miserable failures.
No place like Rome
Love grand opera but wary of a six o’clock curtain with five hours of music behind it? (And nothing is grander than Berlioz’s Les Troyens, eh?) Your dilemma has been solved. Show up at the Met at 7:30 or 8:00, whenever they have the first intermission.
Glass, Gandhi, Occupy: Performance
That Philip Glass’s opera about Gandhi’s nonviolent civil disobedience should be revived by the Metropolitan Opera in 2011—a year marked by nonviolent revolutions and uprisings around the globe—is timely, to say the least. The most recent production of his Satyagraha (1979) was first premiered by the Met in the spring of 2008 as America stood […]
Happy endings
Let me take you back, Parterreians, to the spring of 2009. Shortly before the Met’s new La sonnambula opened, murmurings began to be heard, rumors began to circulate. After the open dress rehearsal, reports were filed as opera fans looked on in horror. At the première, a shell-shocked audience rained down boos on the production […]
happy spirit
All the way from exotic Portland, Operaman writes: Yesterday I attended the Met HD transmission of Orfeo ed Euridice and, once I have told you my reactions and feelings about this show, I cannot wait to hear what members of your cher public who saw or heard it have to say about it. And I […]
point counterpoint
Cher public, who else but La Cieca brings you such in-depth arts coverage that you get not one but two reports from spies at the dress rehearsal of the Met’s new La Damnation de Faust ? After the jump, eyewitness accounts of the Lepagerie from Our Own Gualtier Maldè and Sanford.Â