Opera conductors … my favorite subject!
Michael Spyres talks to Kevin Ng about his winding path as a baritenor, which composer he wants to conquer next, and how he makes Wagner work in his voice — and in his native Ozarks.
Wolfgang Holzmair‘s performance was amazing in its personal and intimate approach.
The Ralph Fiennes production of Eugene Onegin at the Paris Opera is just…fine.
Despite some complications, the Deutsche Oper exhumes buried treasure in Franz Schreker’s Der Schatzgräber.
Iván Fischer‘s Mahler 3 with the Budapest Festival Orchestra at Carnegie Hall is memorable but crude, sometimes exhilarating and often tedious.
Kevin Ng sits down with PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novelist and critic Garth Greenwell to talk about sex, queerness, and the “promise of opera.”
Christof Loy‘s Louise in Aix-en-Provence scratches at the urban– and operatic– unconscious
Perhaps a piece of Mahler’s? For Wagner Month, Chris’s Cache offers the unexpected collaboration Die drei Pintos, started by Wagner-predecessor Carl Maria von Weber and completed by one of Wagner’s followers, Gustav Mahler
Peter Sellars‘s triple bill of Viennese modernism featuring Erwartung and a concert performance of The Raft of the Medusa stare down death at the Salzburg Festival
This Bard production, led by Leon Botstein, makes the strongest possible case musically, dramatically and visually for Smetana’s opera Dalibor.
Eli Jacobson on a luscious evening of early Strauss with Guntram at Carnegie Hall
Francesco Filidei’s new opera The Name of the Rose struggles to bridge the past and the present in Milan
The Met Orchestra Chamber Ensemble’s Das Lied von der Erde skirts the sublime at Carnegie Hall
This performance of Mahler’s Symphony N°8 at the Bozar in Brussels will probably be my last ever Mahler concert.
In Munich, performances by 97-year-old Herbert Blomstedt and 32-year-old Thomas Guggeis show the city’s orchestral ensembles at their best
Maximalism was on the menu last weekend at the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Can György Ligeti‘s only opera be understood as the composer’s own grappling with trauma, death, and memory of a past life?
The score for Innocence was menacing yet comforting, and, essentially, violent and peaceful at the same time
Her star is indeed on the rise, but squarely on her terms.
Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder and Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot are, in their different ways, the final decadent flowering of a musical tradition at its twilight.
Bay Area audiences starved for vocal fare during its opera’s winter/spring hiatus recently experienced two exceptional concerts with distinguished singing at the Davies Symphony Hall.
One of the first things James Conlon did when he took over the reins as Music Director of LA Opera was create the “Recovered Voices” project, producing operas that had been suppressed by the Nazis.
It seemed like such a great idea on paper.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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