Benjamin Bernheim opens up to Emma Hoffman about what really makes a French tenor ahead of his New York recital debut.
Offenbach‘s Robinson Crusoé is salvaged from obscurity.
Les Brigands at the Paris Opera is an expensive joke that never lands
Les Contes d’Hoffmann is something of a puzzle in which some of the pieces are missing and others been altered to fit since Offenbach died before he could complete and revise the work.
Pelléas and Mélisande are not transparent to themselves. Which means: they each have an unconscious.
It doesn’t get more classic than John Dexter‘s Dialogues des Carmélites.
The always elegant Véronique Gens has recently returned often to her earliest roots in the French baroque.
The Met’s Cinderella is a charming adaptation of Massenet’s opera. Frothy, fun, and enchanting, it is a magical holiday treat for the whole family to enjoy.
A good time seemed to be had by all though I don’t recall seeing a single child in attendance.
Trove Thursday celebrates Pride with a Bible-based homoerotic sort-of opera not by the guy who wrote “Depuis le jour”: Charpentier’s David et Jonathas with Mark Padmore, Laurent Naouri and Jaël Azzaretti led by Emmanuelle Haïm.
Tonight at the Met should have welcomed Barrie Kosky’s production of Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel; in its absence Trove Thursday steps in with a recent broadcast featuring this summer’s breakout star Ausrine Stundyte as the enigmatic Renata.
Austin McCormack‘s lascivious choreography outshone a tepid and tedious staging of Saint-Saëns’s old-testament epic.
For opening night 2018, the Met offered the creaky but appealing biblical epic Samson et Dalila, presumably as a vehicle for Elina Garanca and Roberto Alagna.
Trove Thursday wades into the murky musicological waters of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann..
I had my head in my hands groaning in disbelief instead of joining in the general applause around me.
Why, only now, Cendrillon is having its premiere at the Met is a puzzling question.
Last night was my fourth or fifth wade into the slough of Bartlett Sher’s production of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann at the Met since its premiere in 2009.
The Met ushers out this wretched year and rings in the new with an elegant and effective new production of Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette.
There was a general feeling of homecoming in the hall on Friday evening in anticipation of what promised to be a special return visit on many levels.
Walking away from Theatre Châtelet this afternoon, I felt as though my relationship with France and its notoriously perplexing people and culture had at long last reached some degree of depth.
The crossover album: a hint that that an artist has either exhausted all the repertory at her command and owes her record label a new release or that her waning vocal resources really shouldn’t be taxed much further than an octave.
I can think of no other case that resembles Handel’s complex relationship to the story—derived from Ovid’s Metamorphoses—of the ill-fated love between the shepherd Acis and the sea nymph Galatea.
Almost exactly one hundred years ago on March 18, 1912, the Metropolitan Opera gave its final performance to date of Armide.
Opera and comedy can be a very awkward match. Despite the number of comic operas in the standard rep, most opera fans don’t seek out a local production of, say, Die Entführung aus dem Serail because they need a giggle and 30 Rock is a repeat that night. And so the 1997 Opéra National de…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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