I had some trepidation about attending Terence Blanchard’s opera Champion because the “sport” of boxing has never appealed to me.
To paraphrase Terence Blanchard’s Champion, what makes an opera an opera?
Concerts at Wolf Trap, mixed bags in more ways than one, provided fleeting glimpses of the old normal as moments of frisson mingled with more familiar monotony.
Trove Thursday offers Mozart’s Requiem with Lucia Popp, Christa Ludwig, Peter Schreier and Walter Berry conducted by James Levine from the 1981 Salzburg Festival.
I still remember, and some of it quite vividly, what it was like to experience Achim Freyer‘s intense and groundbreaking Ring production all these years later.
Trove Thursday goes mini-epic with Gustave Charpentier’s naturalistic slice-of-life of fin-de-siêcle Paris in a rare 1999 Renée Fleming performance of Louise co-starring Jerry Hadley, Samuel Ramey and Felicity Palmer.
Over the past two decades, the understatedly beguiling Sasha Cooke has inched chronologically inwards in her subtle conquest of swathes of mezzo concert repertoire.
The most distinct pleasure of The Merry Widow at the Metropolitan Opera was the polished, yet warm, performance of Susan Graham as Hanna Glawari.
This Met’s second production of Berg’s 1935 opera was the hot topic of November 2015.
Opera at Caramoor rallied Sunday afternoon with an admirable if erratic performance of Fidelio which was especially memorable for South African soprano Elza van den Heever’s thrilling first-ever Leonore.
This Sunday marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson from breast cancer.
Jarrett Ott is a star. That is the only surprise takeaway from the well-intended snore, Cold Mountain.
Unlike my friend Greg Freed, who entertainingly wrote of his ambivalence about seeing Il trovatore in a movie theater this season, I have embraced the Met Live in HD transmissions as a part of the modern operagoing experience.
Lilith. Pandora. Circe. Salome. “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” Carmen. Brigid O’Shaughnessy: the eternal “femme fatale” still fascinates us.
Impresario Gerard Mortier died earlier today of pancreatic cancer. He was 70.
James Levine: Celebrating 40 Years at the Met includes not only unreleased video performances on DVD but also live radio broadcasts on CD. This performance is one of the latter, originally heard April 19, 2003. The Rake’s Progress has one of the greatest operatic pedigrees of all time. It was inspired by a series of…
La Cieca’s misnomered intime No Expert writes: The New Orleans Opera Association likes to describe New Orleans as “America’s First City of Opera,” and it’s true that opera performance has a long history in the Crescent City, dating back to at least 1796 when André Ernest Grétry’s Sylvain was presented. Since then, New Orleans, and…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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