Washington Concert Opera began its 39th season last month with Christoph Willibald Gluck’s late masterpiece Iphigénie en Tauride.
It is a physical pleasure to hear Kate Lindsey at close quarters.
Grand Tier Grab Bag highlights two “Final Trios” from Der Rosenkavalier recorded just two days apart from one another.
By the time the curtain rose on Verdi’s Luisa Miller last Sunday in Washington Concert Opera’s final show of the season, the originally announced line-up was about as accurate as a federal agency org chart from February.
Too young to be in love. But not too young to go to war or to die.
Michael Spyres’s nobly moving Idomeneo wasn’t just a bravura triumph: singing strongly throughout, he brought more colors to his portrayal of the tortured king than I had experienced from others in the Ponnelle production.
This week Trove Thursday presents Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride in three stirring broadcasts starring Rita Gorr, Gré Brouwenstijn and Sena Jurinac
While isolated opera-lovers intently navigate the deluge of streaming videos being made available, I’ve been listening rather than viewing.
Handel’s biting Agrippina finally arrived at the Metropolitan Opera Thursday evening 310 years after its Venetian premiere.
Washington Concert Opera on the occasion of Gounod’s 200th birthday presented the American premiere of his first opera, Sapho.
No amount of scholarly diligence has kept Les contes d’Hoffmann from being the messiest of all standard-repertory messes.
I don’t usually attend a performance of an opera I’ve known well most of my life expecting a revelation.
The opera is relentlessly obvious, a work that repeatedly turns to tired tropes and canned characters to fill up its nearly three hour run time.
Idomeneo proved enormously moving while a much more complicated Così fan Tutte went for shallow romantic hijinks stripping that work of its darkly ambiguous disturbing view of love.
I have an idea (soon to be angrily debunked in the comments section) that Le nozze di Figaro is rarely a source of unalloyed bliss to the chronic operagoer.
Vittorio Grigolo in the title role of the Met’s revival of Les Contes d’Hoffman is the opera version of the charming homeless drunk.
Clemency tends to get a bad rap these days, as polities demand swift action by leaders whose mandates to govern are violently threatened by “terrorists.”
The appeal of Ariadne auf Naxos (for me anyway) is the acknowledgment that underneath it all, opera (and all other forms of “high art”) is really show business.
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…
So, I was asking my friends with Met Opera insider connections about the new Hoffmann production directed by Bartlett Sher. Seemingly conceived under an unlucky star, this production first lost two of its four heroines when Anna Netrebko decided not sing Olympia and Giulietta but kept Antonia and also Stella, leaving the dramaturgy somewhat lopsided.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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