Dmitri Tcherniakov‘s production of Der Freischütz in Munich may fire a few blanks, but the musicians are all on target.
Golda Schultz soldiers through illness at the New York Philharmonic.
Golda Schultz casts darkness in an alluring light in an intimate recital at the New Orleans Opera Festival.
The inaugural New Orleans Opera Festival goes big across the Big Easy.
Golda Schultz and Jonathan Ware present Dark Matter(s), an intriguing program of songs, at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society.
This summer’s festival, taking place amid record high temperatures and in the wake of its artistic director, Pierre Audi, featured a disquietingly zeigeisty focus on sexual violence.
Look, for one of the most-staged operas in the repertoire, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte seems awfully difficult to stage.
It was, at least, a jolly good show. Whether or not it actually suited Stravinsky’s music or Auden and Kallman’s text, is another question.
It seemed like such a great idea on paper.
If April is the cruelest month, it may be that spring’s arrival brings far too many things to do and see.
Following the great success of its new piece The Factotum, Lyric Opera of Chicago returned to the tried and true with the audience-pleaser Carmen in an equally tried and true 20-year old Lyric production that has stood the test of time.
On paper, the Met’s revival of L’elisir d’amore looked like a lovely evening. And at times it was—a few scenes hinted at what it could be and what it might yet become.
The opera The Rake’s Progress, as many people know already, was inspired by a series of engravings and paintings of the same name by William Hogarth, showing the decline of a young man into depravity and insanity.
A Trove Thursday Mega-Post © featuring the wonderful American soprano Erin Morley in Orff’s Carmina Burana and Richard Strauss’s Brentano Lieder, plus extended live excerpts from Handel’s Orlando, Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots.
Saturday’s performance of Le nozze di Figaro at the Met mined the humor from Mozart’s divine setting of Beaumarchais’s play about a crazy day in the Almaviva household.
Minutes into “An die Nacht,” the first song Friday night, I realized how much I’d missed being enveloped in that seductive Straussian combination of a soprano (or two or three) rising higher and higher over a surging orchestra.
Despite having lost its announced Cherubino, conductor and Count (the latter in the midst of rehearsals), the season premiere of Le Nozze di Figaro Saturday afternoon proved to be one of the most enjoyable Met Mozart performances I’ve attended in ages.
Saturday night’s Rosenkavalier at the Met was an evening of excess — beautiful singing, sensitive acting, elaborate sets, and an unfortunate business that mars Robert Carsen’s otherwise excellent production.
Günther Groissböck’s ridiculously entertaining Baron Ochs and Sir Simon Rattle’s enthralling conducting soared highest during a mostly excellent revival of Der Rosenkavalier.
Opera’s latest superstar, Angel Blue, in a compleat and enthralling portrayal, gloriously sung and rivetingly acted.
Since 1985, from the Chicago Symphony at Carnegie Hall to the Welsh National Opera visiting BAM and from Chicago Lyric to New York City Opera to the Met, I’ve never encountered a bad Falstaff—or one that didn’t astound and delight me.
There comes a time where everything falls into place, and more importantly, when your head and heart are also in the right mindset. That’s when when the opera becomes cathartic, life-changing experience.
To heck with Bayreuth and Salzburg, Glimmerglass and Santa Fe as Rosa Feola sang Mozart at Lincoln Center Friday night and I wouldn’t have been anywhere else!
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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