The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was, somehow, a fun night at the opera—just not one that felt specifically operatic.
Ross Wassermann tracks the development of “Che farò senza Euridice?” — and “J’ai perdu mon Eurydice” — for this month’s Perspectives on an Aria
Jacquelyn Stucker talks to Kevin Ng about repertoire, tearing down the Fach system, and what it takes to make music from baroque to George Benjamin her own.
Needing a Mozart palate-cleanser after the recent misbegotten Marriage of Figaro, I went back more than two decades for a Houston Così fan Tutte featuring then-rising Americans Christine Goerke, Joyce Di Donato, Richard Croft, and Nathan Gunn as the confused lovers.
The English Concert’s annual Handel tour brings Solomon conducted by Harry Bicket to the US beginning Sunday March 5. In anticipation, Chris’s Cache offers Solomon plus four other oratorios by the master: Belshazzar, Hercules, Saul and Jephtha, all via broadcasts for which I feel a personal connection.
Were Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Horne 20th century opera’s ultimate same-sex pairing?
“Trove Thursday” offers a recent broadcast of one of his best-known but rarely performed operas, Il Mitridate Eupatore.
Idomeneo proved enormously moving while a much more complicated Così fan Tutte went for shallow romantic hijinks stripping that work of its darkly ambiguous disturbing view of love.
William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants made a much-anticipated appearance at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival Saturday performing Theodora.
For decades thousands and thousands have attended Handel’s Messiah (usually around Christmas or more appropriately near Easter) making it easily one of the most widely known works of classical music.
Rule Britannia? Often during the Olympics that famous number from Thomas Arne’s 1740 Alfred echoed in my ears.
That Philip Glass’s opera about Gandhi’s nonviolent civil disobedience should be revived by the Metropolitan Opera in 2011—a year marked by nonviolent revolutions and uprisings around the globe—is timely, to say the least. The most recent production of his Satyagraha (1979) was first premiered by the Met in the spring of 2008 as America stood…
Joyce DiDonato enjoys the rare cachet of having three studio-recorded operas released in the past three years while other famous divas must be content with “just” DVDs. Although two of Renée Fleming’s Violettas have found their way onto video in less than five years (why??), “the people’s diva” has only recorded one studio opera in…
Among symbolic classical tropes, one of my favorites (perhaps because only another classicist will understand it) is Nessus’ Shirt, an emblem of glory (a promotion, say, or an expensive luxury) that destroys you.
Our left coast correspondent Baritenor reports: I would not call Grendel an opera for the faint-hearted. The libretto is well-written, but the score jumps to both ends of the operatic spectrum, going from lyrical to modernistic to lyrical again in the blink of an eye. Think Benjamin Britten on crack, if you will, only with…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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