We are the elusive, the mysterious, the ever-courted Millennial Audience, Mr. Darcy to the marketing department’s Mrs. Bennet.
Friday night’s Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera revealed once again a predictable dissonance between the performances on stage and Michael Mayer’s production.
Michael Mayer‘s production of La traviata at the Met is so timid, so devoid of insight, so cynically pandering and gaudy that I hardly feel like it even matters what I think of the performances of the current cast.
Sondra Radvanovsky returned for her 29th Met Aïda Thursday night (but only her second Aïda.)
What happens in Karlsruhe stays in Karlsruhe!
You’d want to expect that every Met retread would draw the same curiosity, the same large crowds, to Lincoln Center.
Diana Damrau‘s performance as Violetta was the work of a very ordinary artist, one susceptible to vocal flubs, poor intonation, and an all too banal approach operatic performance.
It’s high time we see Funny Girl through a different lens.
The Met is on it with something something woker than woke: a noirish psychodrama of a frigid hysteric who seeks redemption via Freudian analysis!
“Trove Thursday” offers a broadcast from last year’s London world premiere of Nico Muhly’s Marnie.
Nico Muhly has set himself the task of presenting Winston Graham’s elusive heroine Marnie on the operatic stage.
No amount of scholarly diligence has kept Les contes d’Hoffmann from being the messiest of all standard-repertory messes.
Jacques Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann has had a bumpy ride to its pride of position in the current French repertoire.
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.
Verdi’s Rigoletto returned to the Met Friday in the stilted “Las Vegas” production by Michael Mayer, with mostly competent singing from a good-looking cast.
I am happy to finally add Les contes d’Hoffmann to the playlist in a Salzburg performance from 2003 with Neil Shicoff in one of his parade roles.
A “lone voice in the wilderness” booed Barbara Frittoli’s calamitous Nedda.
With help from the Met’s invaluable performance archive, here is a look back at just some of what you could have seen, and perhaps did see, on October 31st through the years at the Met.
After nearly three years and over 20 performances Michael Mayer’s “Las Vegas” production of Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera still outrages many.
I never thought I’d see the day when Giuseppe Verdi and Benjamin Britten would battle it out for musical superiority but that’s exactly what happened in Los Angeles this year.
Baden-Baden 1927 is the title Gotham Chamber Opera has given to its evening of four brief operas that premiered together at a festival in, yes, Baden-Baden on July 17, 1927.
If Frank Castorf‘s work on Der Ring des Nibelungen at Bayreuth accomplishes nothing else, it should serve as a sort of loud disorganized reminder of the dangers of indulging in the intentional fallacy.
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.
The operatives were busy over the midnight hours: “Act 3 was a mixed bag. The opening showed Villazon in much better form, with solid phrasing. The Mad Scene started out beautiful, Netrebko spinning out haunting legato. She was completely involved and engaged. Then she fell apart at the flute solo, sounding under supported and wavering…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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