Washington Concert Opera returned to its roots with a delightful performance of Georges Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de perles.
While the Met’s Mozart-lite holiday production of The Magic Flute kept the eyes entertained with spectacular sets and costumes, the scattershot casting and lack of musical seriousness dragged down this opera for beginners.
This archly traditional production of La bohème was a little shaky on opening night. It nevertheless had a full complement of sterling individual performances to take us on home.
The Cunning Little Vixen, Leos Janacek’s late-career opera—a wonderous work with an almost miraculous sense of charm and poignance—has found significant success in conservatories.
Puccini’s schmaltziest, most melodic, most dramatically limp, most cynical, most obscure mature work
Next week Puccini’s La Rondine returns to the Met for the first time in eleven years, so Chris’s Cache offers three quite diverse sopranos as Magda: Ljuba Welitsch, Virginia Zeani, and Cristina Gallardo-Domâs.
Original Director Richard Jones and revival director Benjamin Davis have created a staging that veers wildly between fascinating and fatally flawed.
Sunday’s “Rising Stars in Concert”, featuring the Ryan Opera Center ensemble and members of the Lyric Opera Orchestra, was a stirring and entertainingly musical afternoon.
Jules Massenet’s version of the Cinderella fairy tale, Cendrillon, seems to be back in vogue after many years of obscurity.
I mean, how often does one get to hear Bernstein’s gorgeous, rollicking, and varied score nursed by a full orchestra and the artistic resources of an opera company?
The late-mid 1730s were transitional years for Handel, to put it nicely.
In Charlie Parker’s Yardbird, an opera based on the famed jazz musician’s life, the title character asks, “So if there is a God, why does the negro suffer? Is my prayer, my music lesser, smaller in God’s eyes?”
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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