I don’t know if I’ll ever hear as great a performance as René Pape‘s Gurnemanz.
A new production of Parsifal at San Francisco Opera stirred something deep inside Michael Anthonio about how music soothes the soul
Nigel Wilkinson takes on the first installment of the Paris Opera’s new Calixto Bieito-directed Ring Cycle
Sparks flew when the San Francisco Opera opened their new production of Richard Wagner’s monumental Tristan und Isolde on Saturday, October 19th, at the War Memorial Opera House.
“The distance between dreams and reality is called action.” – Brian Tracy
At the Met’s performance of Manon Tuesday evening, Michael Fabiano made as good a case as any for renaming the opera Chevalier des Grieux.
Minnesota Opera’s stab at boosting revenue with extra performances of something surefire never caught fire.
Wagner’s Ring is an artistic masterpiece that is peerless in its ability to continually reveal layers of musical, theatrical, and philosophical insight
Lohengrin descended upon the Wiener Staatsoper this month like American college students to Oktoberfest: loudly, spastically, not especially coherent, and in full lederhosen and dirndls.
Plácido Domingo’s conducting reduced the score’s urgency to the lethargy of a jellyfish.
Psychology is encoded in the composer’s vocal lines more than his librettist’s words.
Thoughtless direction stifled the epic drama.
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.
The Canadian Robert Carsen would appear to love the theater to the point of fixation.
Das Rheingold is the outlier among the Ring operas, an ensemble work with a fast-shifting plot, animated dialogue, fewer set pieces and less character development.
The production by Sebastian Baumgarten is the type of regietheater that’s not a rethinking or reconstruction, but just a hot mess.
Piotr Beczala, Soile Isokoski and Kwangchul Youn star in this 2009 performance of Faust from the Wiener Staatsoper, idiomatically conducted by Bertrand de Billy.
This week, Our Own Jungfer Marianne Leizmetzerin presents what is perhaps the briefest Bühnenweihfestspiel on record.
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.
Midway through his traversal of Wagner’s 10 mature operas for PentaTone, we’ve learned this about Marek Janowski:
Stefan Herheim’s production of Parsifal for Bayreuth is the regie Holy Grail—a production that completely fulfills the promise and purpose of Regietheater.
Fertilization; birth; growth; decay. Eating; digestion; defecation; fermentation; biogas recovery; food production. Wagner’s Tannhäuser is a meditation on the relentless, repetition of cycles that define our existence and man’s insistence on the possibility salvation despite all the biochemical evidence to the contrary.
A new CD set of Der Ring des Nibelungen, recorded live at the Bayreuth Festival in 2008, is slim on superstar casting, but basks in the reflected glory of conductor Christian Thielemann, a controversial artist with a passionate following. So how does the music measure up?
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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