It’s a busy summer for Vida Miknevičiūtė and Eric Cutler, the subjects of this week’s Grand Tier Grab Bag.
Dmitri Tcherniakov’s interpretation of Wagner’s Der Fliegende Höllander presents an engrossing character study about Senta and the Dutchman’s struggles against their insular community’s stifling conformism.
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.
Gianandrea Noseda leads seasoned Wagnerians in Andreas Homoki’s stark production of Die Walküre for Zurich Opera.
On the first viewing of this Idomeneo, with a cast clad mostly in military khaki green set against a green sky, the eye starts to tire from the dullness of the surroundings.
What is surreal, symbolic, and generally mysterious in the dramatic arts can get a bad rap.
Despite the continued popularity of Der Freischütz in German-speaking countries, are the magical mature operas of Carl Maria von Weber otherwise really so problematic, their libretti so unwieldy to explain their continued absence from the world’s stages?
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.
You Parterrestrials know all about Santa Fe Opera’s amazing mountain setting and open-sided theater affording breathtaking sunsets, weather-related drama and–when the back stage wall is opened–starry backdrops, but it was my first visit, so indulge me a little.
Oh, Rossini, Rossini! You mad, adorable fool! What power could you find in the theaters of Paris to keep you from Neapolitan arms? If you are fond of Rossini (or any other major composer), you will want to collect the whole set. Each piece of the jigsaw adds detail to the picture, but there are…
This is a performance I never thought I’d see. This 2003 Met performance of Ariadne auf Naxos was filmed, but got tied up in some kind of (legal?) dispute and never televised, and I had long written it off as being tucked away in a vault, doomed to be “the lost telecast.” So it is…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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