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.
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
People these days often exclaim “…..is everything!” but often it feels like gross hyperbole. But surely anyone who has seen Mark Morris’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato since it premiered in 1989 would agree that it is indeed everything!
There is a deep sense of culmination and finality when we discuss the last works of the great Masters.
Only the Sound Remains introduced Americans to the latest collaboration between dazzling Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and hirsute metteur-en-scène Peter Sellars.
Joyce, Javier and now Julia—this week these three remarkable Js brought New York City memorable “Cinderella stories.”
Lincoln Center hosted two milestones this week.
Love grand opera but wary of a six o’clock curtain with five hours of music behind it? (And nothing is grander than Berlioz’s Les Troyens, eh?) Your dilemma has been solved. Show up at the Met at 7:30 or 8:00, whenever they have the first intermission.
Among symbolic classical tropes, one of my favorites (perhaps because only another classicist will understand it) is Nessus’ Shirt, an emblem of glory (a promotion, say, or an expensive luxury) that destroys you.
A DVD of a 2001 Met performance of Berg’s Wozzeck is included in James Levine: Celebrating 40 Years at the Met – DVD Box Set, and it’s easy to see why this performance was chosen. Levine and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra he has done so much to build and improve are the real stars of…
Our own Gualtier told tales and named names, in great detail, after Monday’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann dress rehearsal. Squirrel was at the premiere, and had a grand old time. Bartlett Sher‘s production lovingly displays the many dimensions of Offenbach’s inspired and charming opera. With perfect comedic timing, clarity of action, and real depth of feeling, even its few…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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