In Napoli where love is queen In Napoli where love is queen

Final opera of the season. Little-known opera. A revival. So, you can probably skip it, right?

Keep the Rome fires burning Keep the Rome fires burning

Handel’s biting Agrippina finally arrived at the Metropolitan Opera Thursday evening 310 years after its Venetian premiere.

Home brew Home brew

An extraordinarily rich variety of opera happens locally, under the umbrella of New York Opera Fest.

Bushwick leagues Bushwick leagues

LoftOpera is just one, though perhaps the liveliest, of many homegrown opera troupes in Brooklyn.

Alt folks at home Alt folks at home

A Countertenor Cabaret, starred no fewer than 14 of these once-rare songbirds, in the cabaret space of the Duplex on Sheridan Square.

Ulysses in Midtown Ulysses in Midtown

In the program for Opera Omnia’s production of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno di Ulisse, Crystal Manich, the company’s stage director, speaks of producing “baroque works in non-traditional ways.”

Self-conquest Self-conquest

Probably no more than 100 gathered Tuesday in a curtained-off space in the lobby of NYC’s Gershwin Hotel to witness the North American premiere of Rodrigo by operamission.

Mode and moderne

Wednesday afternoon, Pocket Orchestra New York’s new PONYmobile presented a guerrilla performance of sorts in a most unlikely space, the XES Lounge in Manhattan, where designer Joel Yapching‘s BOOK homme debuted its Spring/Summer 2012 collection to the strains of Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in patria. 

Sexual perversity in Gowanus

It is a thousand pities Francesco Cavalli never saw Some Like It Hot. A tale of convoluted romances, cross-dressing, immoral moralizing and a divine diva would have been right up his alley, or rather, Venetian canal. As staged by Vertical Players Repertory in a back alley around the corner from the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn’s…

Teen spirit

Not everything a genius creates is … a work of genius. Y’know? Mozart, for example: Sure, he was a prodigy at four, and at ten, and even at fourteen, but did he actually compose anything spectacular before he turned, say, seventeen? I’m thinking of “Exultate, Jubilate,” if you want to know. 

Discounted Island

We’re going to be hearing a lot about pasticcios in the next seven months, as we run up to The Enchanted Island at the Met. We’d better get used to the idea, and what better way to do so than to go hear a home-made pasticcio at far lower prices? 

In the realm of the senses

Pornography being the seminal [sic] art form of our time, through which every other art is interpreted (I lament this, but what can you do?), and opera being in one of its periodic up-cycles, new ones being composed and premiered, old ones being dusted off for re-use, and stage directors feeling impelled, as they do,…