Christopher Corwin surveys the three Traviata casts — led by Lisette Oropesa, Rosa Feola, and Ermonela Jaho — at the Met this spring.
Back-to-back casts in the Metropolitan Opera’s revivals of Madama Butterfly and La traviata offer ample opportunity for soprano-gazing.
Lisette Oropesa, Piotr Buszewski, and Luca Salsi feature in a rote revival of Michael Mayer‘s cloying production of La traviata.
Elina Garanca is back at the Met for the first time since 2020 — her Amneris is, in a word, sensational.
Christina Nilsson‘s debut enlivens the Met’s new Aïda.
I had been hopeful that 2024 would end, if not on a high note, then one that was at least in tune.
Anticipating the first new local Aïda in thirty-six years, Chris’s Cache revisits Verdi’s popular opera in four unusually interesting in-house recordings from the Met 1961-1976.
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.
When my editor suggested to me a round-up of my favorite recordings of Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann I was très, très, intrigued.
Chopping up the action and dutifully showing each plot point may work in a film but in an opera, where every piece of marginal dialogue must be set to music, it feels like a chore.
Old opera productions at the end of their performing life can be sad affairs.
Angel Blue‘s refulgent, lush soprano blooms as Violetta’s vocal lines broaden and soar.
A quick survey of the Met website shows wide swaths of available seats for the upcoming performances of La traviata and L’elisir d’amore. Only new works like The Hours and Fire Shut Up in My Bones have been achieving sold-out houses.
The first time I heard of Ermonela Jaho it was as the ultimate understudy. In the aughts it seemed that every time Angela Gheorghiu or Anna Netrebko or whoever canceled, Jaho was standing by.
The main reason to see this revival is Benjamin Bernheim’s Duca.
Come back, Big Clock! We need you more than ever!
Only three years separate the creation of The Most Happy Fella (1956) and The Sound of Music (1959), but there’s a proverbial ocean between these two Golden Age musicals are being performed at prestigious festivals this summer.
Can we start by not using Barbra Streisand as a polestar here?
At the heart of this success was Quinn Kelsey’s revelatory take on Rigoletto. He was matched, vocally and dramatically, by Rosa Feola’s Gilda—a tour-de-force performance.
“Once upon a time / Lived a foolish king. / Mocking Death, his crime, / Pure chaos he bring.”
In operatic pathology, diseases are endowed with preposterous mythological properties: they are both an emblem of desire and the punishment for desire. They are crime, confessional, and executioner all rolled into one.
At the Metropolitan Opera on Friday night, an otherwise undistinguished Traviata was salvaged by an astonishing performance from Aleksandra Kurzak, whose Violetta was an incontrovertible triumph.
Little Shop of Horrors loses its necessary edge when it’s wrested from the gritty world of its creation.
It was quite a pleasure—a privilege, really—to see John Dexter’s legendary production of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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