I’ve been picking away yet again at the mysterious symbiosis between an opera’s words and its music.
Curtis Opera Theater mounted a musically remarkable account of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic on March 2.
Missy Mazzoli, a 36-year-old composer from Brooklyn, has created the most startling and moving new American opera in memory.
Nixon in China is one of several titles that when I tell people that it’s on my Top Ten Favorite list of operas, I get strange looks.
When John Adams’ A Flowering Tree had its world premiere in Vienna in 2006, critical reaction from the Austrian and German press was mixed-to-negative.
New York City isn’t a bad place to live, operatically-speaking.
It was a night a-tingle with excitement at the Metropolitan Opera House.
Philip Glass’s 25th opera The Perfect American was originally commissioned for New York City Opera during the aborted regime of Gerard Mortier.
The experience of watching Wagner’s final opera Parsifal is frequently elevated to a spiritual occurrence, and productions have historically emphasized the religious dimension of the opera’s core themes of redemption and the dangers of temptation.
Although Walter Braunfels was among those German composers whose music was banned in their home country after 1933, and whose political rehabilitiation in 1945 was not accompanied by a commensurate revival of his music, his 1920 opera Die Vögel should need no special pleading on musical or dramatic grounds. Though Braunfels is traditionally described as…
There were a disproportionate number of young people at the Met today—even younger than me, which is really young. That made me happy and smile while filing in line to enter the auditorium. Hopefully this is the next generation of undying fans and queens about to plunge into a “new” world of opera spearheaded by…
I have heard Gerald Finley live and enjoyed his singing immensely. He possesses a strong, resonant, lyric baritone, even of scale and beautiful of timbre. His biggest successes to date have been creating the roles of Oppenheimer in John Adams‘ Dr. Atomic and Harry in Mark-Anthony Turnage‘s The Silver Tassie. He includes selections from both…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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