Calling from 2066, Brendan Latimer argues that the best way to save opera might be to just blow up the standard repertoire altogether.
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.
Director Richard Jones’ well-traveled and visually arresting production of Humperdinck’s 1893 opera Hansel and Gretel has returned to Lyric Opera of Chicago after a 10-year absence.
Last weekend, On Site Opera presented What Lies Beneath, a program of maritime-themed operatic excerpts staged aboard the 19th century schooner Wavertree (now a part of the South Street Seaport Museum).
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.
This a sincere revival with a social conscience, a chance to take immersive part in the Christmas miracle, not just watch it remotely.
Wedlock, betrayal, sibling rivalry, feminism, and union strikes give the opera Morning Star much of its driving thematic material.
It was an afternoon of spectacular singing, particularly from the two principals and the glorious Lyric Opera Chorus.
Hansel and Gretel might just be the best thing the Met has done so far this season.
If Darius Milhaud took a risk in adapting La Mère Coupable as an opera, it wasn’t the quirky, atonal style he used for his score.
An extraordinarily rich variety of opera happens locally, under the umbrella of New York Opera Fest.
That Placido Domingo and James Levine, the Met’s inexorable septuagenarians, would team up yet again—on April Fools’ Day, no less—for a revival of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra occasioned an uncomfortable degree of doubt and dread.
Poor Paisiello. Out of the nearly 100 operas written by this industrious composer just one was generally regarded as a masterpiece.
I avoided visiting any waxworks establishment until On Site Opera’s lively production of Rameau’s one-act Pygmalion summoned me Tuesday evening to Madame Tussauds just off New York City’s Times Square.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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