Calling from 2066, Brendan Latimer argues that the best way to save opera might be to just blow up the standard repertoire altogether.
Before her one-woman La voix humaine with the New York Philharmonic, Barbara Hannigan talks to Kevin Ng about her career, her artistry, and whether or not there’s a voice on the other line.
Baritone John Brancy smoothly traverses the American songbook at Carnegie Hall.
Big voices overwhelm Claus Guth‘s toothless staging of Khovanshchina at the Berlin Staatsoper.
I came to The Rake’s Progress with a huge “Show Me” chip on my shoulder.
In his new production that opens at San Francisco Opera this weekend, Matthew Ozawa is creating a Parsifal for the cancel culture age.
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
Pénélope at the Bayerische Staatsoper’s summer festival spotlights the crossroads between the nostalgic and the progressive.
In Munich, performances by 97-year-old Herbert Blomstedt and 32-year-old Thomas Guggeis show the city’s orchestral ensembles at their best
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.
I have a confession and you may need to sit down for it: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita was one of the gateway drugs to my eventual opera fandom.
The past seems to be in conversation with the present.
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.
My sole live encounter with Seiji Ozawa coincided with his final appearances at the Metropolitan Opera, where he conducted its 2008 revival of Tchaikovsky’s Pikovaya Dama.
The Aix festival organized two back-to-back evening concerts dedicated to the Russian masters. One was an embarrassment of Slavic riches, the other… well, just an embarrassment.
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.
When LA Opera finally decided to put a toe in the water and mount its first production since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was Igor Stravinsky‘s opera/oratorio Oedipus Rex.
The ballet I have grown to love, admire, and ponder the most is Stravinsky’s first collaboration with George Balanchine, Apollo.
Odyssey Opera’s Ägyptische Helena was a beautifully executed production of a flawed opera.
The chaos is nonstop, the comedy is broad and physical, and requires a large ensemble of singers who can execute Rossinian polysyllabic patter while taking pratfalls.
No other singer of Die Amme approaches the towering standard set by the German mezzo Tanja Ariane Baumgartner.
At the opening of the Scottish Opera’s 2017 production of Turnage’s opera Greek, I was very sorry I’d missed Anna Nicole.
I hardly know where to heap my praise first.
A rollicking performance of his delightful comic opera Der geduldige Sokrates featuring a fine cast and the magnificent Akademie für Alte Musik conducted by René Jacobs.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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