139 pieces since 2007 — in 35 roles, at 15 companies, most often at Metropolitan Opera.
Sir David McVicar’s inept and dreary new production of Bellini’s Norma proved to be more satisfying than it had been on opening night when it returned to the Met Friday evening thanks to its new leading ladies Angela Meade and Jamie Barton
I suspect that David McVicar’s new production of the Metropolitan Opera’s Norma had its most congenial showing as a totality, specifically in the HD format at the movie theater.
Handel’s biting Agrippina finally arrived at the Metropolitan Opera Thursday evening 310 years after its Venetian premiere.
“Trove Thursday” presents for the third annual installment of “Handel for my Birthday” a wickedly ideal Felicity Palmer dominating Agrippina.
Sunday afternoon at Carnegie Hall two remarkable slices of soprano-heaven were served up, first by Carolyn Sampson and then by Erin Morley, during the second act of Handel’s Orlando.
New York City isn’t a bad place to live, operatically-speaking.
Sunday afternoon’s intermittently involving concert performance of Handel’s Alcina at Carnegie Hall starred an unusually intense Joyce DiDonato as a powerful sorceress blinded by her romantic delusions.
David Fox and Dan Johnson report on Yannick Nézet-Seguin‘s recent performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 with the Philadelphia Orchestra in Philadelphia and New York.
Maximalism was on the menu last weekend at the Philadelphia Orchestra.
The Met stage was filled with considerable magic Monday night when its dizzily effervescent revival of La Cenerentola starring Joyce DiDonato and Javier Camarena stirred a bewitched audience to some of the most ecstatic ovations heard this season.
I don’t usually attend a performance of an opera I’ve known well most of my life expecting a revelation.
Trove Thursday” presents Béatrice et Bénédict in a 2009 performance featuring Joyce DiDonato and Charles Workman and conducted by Sir Colin Davis.
After putting a hiatus on their awards in 2020 and 2021 (for reasons that are all too well-known to all of us), the Richard Tucker Foundation Gala returned on Sunday evening November 13 honoring soprano Angel Blue the 2022 Award winner.
Why, only now, Cendrillon is having its premiere at the Met is a puzzling question.
As a child I had but a few criteria that were necessary to ensure a happy entertainment. These included mostly ball-gowns, fairy godmothers and Julie Andrews, though Sally Ann Howes was acceptable in a pinch.
My memory is fading but the events I recall most vividly of the last season seem largely to have been concert performances.
Trove Thursday previews Massenet’s Werther—due to return next month at the Met—with a 1984 Paris performance starring two marvelous protagonists, Tatiana Troyanos and Alain Vanzo.
Between them, Maria Guleghina, Marcello Giordani, James Morris and John Del Carlo have nearly 150 combined years of service on stage.
A good time seemed to be had by all though I don’t recall seeing a single child in attendance.
In its first go-around in November 2022, Kevin Puts’s The Hours (libretto by Greg Pierce based on the novel by Michael Cunningham and the screenplay for the Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film was a box office bullseye for the Metropolitan Opera.
A young friend messaged me to ask if I knew Rossini’s Macbeth.
For our first review in a new series, we turn to the new recording of Dido and Aeneas featuring Joyce DiDonato, Michael Spyres and Maxim Emelyanychev leading Il Pomo d’Oro.
To conclude its triumphant season, last week the Met Orchestra performed its annual Carnegie Hall concerts under music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin and once again performed superbly.
Michael Spyres as Faust, despite a few flickers of indisposition, was nearly ideal.
My mother asked me once, whilst staring aghast at my CD collection, why I needed so many copies of Don Giovanni.
Among the “auditions” that have come flooding in from the cher public are reviews of three very different productions of Don Giovanni. Your doyenne has taken the liberty of combining the three critiques into a single posting, but she urges you to remember, remember well the names of the authors of this troika of treatises.
Needing a Mozart palate-cleanser after the recent misbegotten Marriage of Figaro, I went back more than two decades for a Houston Così fan Tutte featuring then-rising Americans Christine Goerke, Joyce Di Donato, Richard Croft, and Nathan Gunn as the confused lovers.
The sound of Joyce DiDonato, Lawrence Brownlee and John Osborn nailing La Donna del Lago’s thrilling second-act trio alone made worthwhile enduring one of the ugliest, most bone-headed productions seen at the Metropolitan Opera in many a year.
A stack of noteworthy recent baroque vocal CDs on my desk has been staring at me for weeks, so I’m tackling them on Handel’s birthday before the Met roars back into action beginning this weekend.
Three of the Met’s most cunning vocalists, Juan Diego Flórez, Joyce DiDonato and Diana Damrau, wrap their tongues around the trio from Le Comte Ory.
A live broadcast of the prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos featuring Julia Varady, a favorite sopranos in a role she sang only rarely.
Friday’s season premiere at the Met of Donizetti’s opera about the doomed Scottish queen proved surprisingly satisfying and a genuine success for Sondra Radvanovsky.
Joyce DiDonato is taking her Mary Stuart on the road, so to speak.
It’s easiest to write reviews when there are soaring triumphs and miserable failures.
I’ve had this DVD sitting in my apartment for literally months – mea culpa, La – and I finally got around to watching Mark Adamo’s opera Little Women last weekend. Commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera, the piece received almost unanimous critical and popular acclaim when it premiered in 1998. This DVD was recorded for […]
The key to enjoying Bellini’s I Capuleti e Montechi is to do a hard factory reset and reformat your brain to forget all other works based on Romeo and Juliet.
Vocal glamour in abundance highlighted the opening performance of LA Opera’s Il barbiere di Siviglia on November 29 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion, with much buzz attendant on the company debuts of Rossini experts Juan Diego Flórez and Joyce DiDonato. Adding excitement was the Figaro of Nathan Gunn, who played with Errol Flynn panache, and […]
Rossini’s Semiramide is a highly original and imaginative work of theater that impresses for its creative and beautifully scored orchestration, incisive recitatives and ensembles, and theatrically intriguing characters.
“Semiramide—a better opera than this dude expected!”
Maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin, always with a gift for gab, is ever more loquacious in concerts, often talking directly to the audience.
At the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday night, Mozart’s opera never sounded fresher, a superstar cast shining new light on one of the composer’s all-too-seldom-performed scores.
“None of that sentimental crap, okay?”
I completely missed The Enchanted Island during the Met’s 2011-12 season, both in the house and in the HD presentation. Even on Sirius, I had only heard snippets of the performance.
The New Year’s Eve gala at the Met ushering out 2011 was the world premiere of the much-anticipated mash-up The Enchanted Island AKA “baroque opera for those who hate (or at least don’t know) baroque opera.
Kaija Saariaho’s spectral, shattering Innocence makes its Metropolitan Opera debut.
La Cieca’s spy reports from the Met: “A promising and delightful final dress of Ariadne yesterday.”
The film of The Hours failed to effectively weave together the novel’s trio of threads of interiority about suicide and secondarily literary creation. I wondered if an opera would stand a better chance at achieving that? Based on Tuesday’s diva-encrusted stage premiere of Kevin Puts and Greg Pierce’s The Hours, its creators didn’t pull it off either.
Dramaturgically, The Hours is a mixed bag: I wouldn’t discard it, but I would want to fix it. But simply as an evening of gorgeous music and singing, it’s cordon bleu.
The days are getting shorter, but you can keep the prattle going this fall’s Talk of the Town! You will, you can, you must join in the discussion about: Great mezzo soprano performances (October),
Gained in translation (November), Teleport me back to… (December).
Quinn Kelsey and Lise Davidsen star in the Met's new Macbeth. We're giving away one ticket, so screw your courage to the sticking place and enter now!
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