Festival d’Aix-en-Provence confronts the living and the dead — and its own future — through audacious productions and an intimate world premiere.
I can’t say 2025 was my best operagoing year; apart from a superb Fille du régiment, most of my good nights at the opera were decidedly mixed affairs.
Kent Nagano‘s and the Richard-Wagner-Akademie‘s historically informed Ring Cycle takes on Siegfried in Dresden
A new recording by the London Symphony Orchestra is the latest landmark in a spring full of Janácek‘s Jenufa
Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads the Philadelphia Orchestra, Stuart Skelton, and Nina Stemme in a Tristan und Isolde for the ages
Following last week’s performances in Cleveland, Ronnie Banerjee compares six different versions of the Kostelnicka’s monologue from Leos Janácek’s Jenufa for “Perspectives on an Aria”
Cameron Kelsall reports on a transcendent Jenufa from the Cleveland Orchestra
A recent conversation with a friend who has loved Die Frau ohne Schatten for twice as long as I have been alive revealed that we both had some unresolved questions about the plot.
My sole live encounter with Seiji Ozawa coincided with his final appearances at the Metropolitan Opera, where he conducted its 2008 revival of Tchaikovsky’s Pikovaya Dama.
I’ve never had a better time in an opera house.
Leos Janacek’s 1904 opera Jenufa could be a rather grim affair.
On June 16, San Francisco Opera concluded their excellent Centennial Season with a heartfelt 100th Anniversary Concert, featuring a starry cast, three conductors (including current and former Music Directors) and the SF Opera Orchestra and Chorus.
Tonight’s chat is late (10:00 PM EDT / 7:00 PM PDT) and based on a pay-per-view event, but….
Nina Stemme’s program guided her audience through a period of musical history that explores themes of love and mortality with texts that traverse emotional extremes.
In Richard Strauss’s Arabella, the heroine is consumed with finding the right man—der Richtige—but who is the right Arabella?
If it is true that there are few respectable ways for people over 40 without small children to celebrate Halloween, a performance of Richard Strauss’ pioneering horror opera Elektra belongs on the short list.
Nina Stemme’s Elektra always seemed the sanest individual onstage never quite giving over to obsession or hysteria with a good line in mordant sarcasm and contempt.
Minutes into “An die Nacht,” the first song Friday night, I realized how much I’d missed being enveloped in that seductive Straussian combination of a soprano (or two or three) rising higher and higher over a surging orchestra.
Imagine my surprise then when I discovered a new recording of Tristan und Isolde released by Navona Records, a small label based in New Hampshire that primarily focuses on recitals of chamber music, solo works, and smaller ensemble pieces.
When I think of Nina Stemme’s voice, I think of gianduja, Armagnac soaked dark cherries, and chestnuts.
A sense of celebration was definitely in the air last Thursday at the Vienna State Opera.
Erwartung and Bluebeard’s Castle returned to Lincoln Center Thursday night in a musically scintillating if theatrically mild double-bill by the New York Philharmonic.
Following classic recordings documenting the work of Karl Böhm and Herbert von Karajan. Orfeo’s 150 Years Wiener Staatsoper box moves on to new releases that are seeing their first incarnation on an officially available disc.
The Wiener Staatsoper commemorated its 150th anniversary with a musically sensational presentation of Richard Strauss’ Die Frau Ohne Schatten.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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