Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen shows that he’s at the top of a crowded pack of countertenors in two recent New York performances with Philharmonia Baroque.
Ilana Walder-Biesanz reports from The Santa Fe Opera, where Tobias Picker‘s latest opera falls short, a new Rodelinda scintillates, and sumptuous singing abounds across the entire repertoire.
Vanessa is spare and compelling in Heartbeat Opera’s production.
A high-drama Vanessa by the Boston Symphony Orchestra offers something to believe in.
R.B. Schlather‘s shadowy production with Heartbeat Opera at the Williamstown Theatre Festival proves that Vanessa might be coming into its own at last
In Handel’s Rodelinda, a usurped monarch, believed dead, returns to avenge his deposition and reclaim the woman he loves.
Yuval Sharon at Boston Lyric Opera has brilliantly found an interpretative middle ground for La bohème by presenting the acts in reverse order.
Director R.B. Schlather deftly walks a porous boundary, casting this primordial paroxysm of Germanness as a dialogue between its naïve and moralistic narrative with its outsized legacy.
In 2022, making Così fan tutte intimate is not a radical act. Making it enjoyable, however, is.
Turandot finally arrives on Trove Thursday, but it’s the setting by Ferruccio Busoni which predates by a decade the one by that other Italian guy, and it’s paired today with Arlecchino, the composer’s other commedia dell’arte-influenced short opera.
It’s difficult to reconcile what Schlather writes with what we see onstage, which is a jumble not only of pianos, but of periods and concepts.
Composer/librettist David Hertzberg’s The Rose Elf, which gave its world premiere in the Green-Wood Cemetery Catacombs last weekend, is indeed a marvel of elfin proportions.
A dozen women or more talk and sing about all sort of important and exciting things, with “a man” near the bottom of their list of priorities.
It was a timeout—but maybe it was a timeout we deserved.
Kevin Newbury‘s familiar production of Bellini’s Norma with its most frequent leading lady, the American Sondra Radvanovsky.
Curtis Opera Theater mounted a musically remarkable account of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic on March 2.
Poor Paisiello. Out of the nearly 100 operas written by this industrious composer just one was generally regarded as a masterpiece.
Director R.B. Schlather and his team explored Handel’s Orlando and the results, as seen at Monday night’s final presentation, proved uncommonly stimulating.
For those who like their Handel loud, with no forfeit of baroque finesse, one promising solution is to make the hall smaller.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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