Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s concert Rigoletto hits some vocal turbulence
The Monkey King at San Francisco Opera combines spectacle and sentiment.
Adela Zaharia and Amartuvshin Enkhbat shine brightly in San Francisco Opera’s opening night Rigoletto.
Before this weekend, I never thought I would want to leave an opera by Act I. The recent production of Puccini’s La bohème at the Lyric Opera of Chicago taught me that there’s a first time for everything.
While the Met’s Mozart-lite holiday production of The Magic Flute kept the eyes entertained with spectacular sets and costumes, the scattershot casting and lack of musical seriousness dragged down this opera for beginners.
As an opera fanatic who was baptized by the blood of Leontyne Price, the Messa da Requiem by Giuseppe Verdi appeared on my radar fairly soon after I started delving into the operatic canon.
Washington National Opera’s final production of the season, seen May 22, is also its high point: a new Turandot directed by Francesca Zambello, updated to the 20th century and featuring the world premiere of a completion of Puccini’s score by composer Christopher Tin and playwright and screenwriter Susan Soon He Stanton.
Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder and Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot are, in their different ways, the final decadent flowering of a musical tradition at its twilight.
I love it, truly, just not that much.
Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Don Carlos was a real feast of good singing and orchestral grandeur.
It’s a wonderful idea to cast Bohème with young singers, and these delivered astonishingly assured, confident, mature performances.
You’d think by now I’d know better than to make snap judgments about an opera or a singer—but apparently not.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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