Ahead of their opening in Don Carlo in Dallas tonight, Christopher Corwin chats with Nicole Car and Étienne Dupuis — and offers a special edition of Chris’s Cache!
I can’t say 2025 was my best operagoing year; apart from a superb Fille du régiment, most of my good nights at the opera were decidedly mixed affairs.
Second casts in Don Giovanni and Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera offer mixed blessings.
Carmen Paddock and Mr. Portafiori aren’t getting the hype behind Ivo van Hove, Krzysztof Warlikowski, and Calitxo Bieito
Audacious star performances elevate safe direction in Richard II and The Seagull on London’s West End
Back to Brussels last Sunday for my third new opera of the season (after The Time of our Singing, also at La Monnaie, and Picture a day like this, at the Opéra Comique): Mikael Karlsson’s Fanny and Alexander, with a libretto by Royce Vavrek.
Following Gundula Janowitz and Janet Baker, Chris’s Cache sends birthday greetings to another favorite diva—Karita Matilla—with a quartet of broadcasts.
“None of that sentimental crap, okay?”
Simon McBurney’s Die Zauberflöte, the second new production of the Met’s May Mozart Miracle, opened on Friday to rousing near-unanimous cheers.
Like a sommelier of male entitlement, Peter Mattei paired with precision moves from a wide-ranging vocabulary of gesture.
“This used to be a funhouse… but now it’s full of evil clowns / It’s time to start the countdown…. I’m gonna burn it down”
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.
“Spring has sprung,” announces MasterVoices’ director Ted Sperling with a smile at the beginning of Part III. And indeed, even the doomsayers among us (and I count myself one) can’t help but feel signs of cautious optimism, as the world we knew slowly but noticeably begins to re-emerge.
There are a number of fine elements in this film, and a couple that are exceptional—but I can’t get over the wrongness of its look.
Time to stop being coy, I think. You and I had quite different takeaways on the show, didn’t we?
It’s 2020, Ivo’s the new Ethel Merman, and I caught a preview of his fourth Broadway show and first Broadway musical, West Side Story.
Ivo van Hove really seems to be everywhere lately.
I was shocked to realize I hadn’t seen Don Giovanni at the Met since Michael Grandage’s stultifying production opened in 2011.
Beginning with the dark, ominous music of the prelude of Charles Wuorinen and Annie Proulx’s opera Brokeback Mountain, we know we are in for a very different and far less sentimental version of the work than was had with Ang Lee’s iconic 2005 film.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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