Stockholm syndrome
The big news out of the Bay this week, of course, is that David Gockley, after ten years at the helm here and over forty in opera, has decided not to pull a Bloomberg/Galupe-Borszkh.
Thomas Hampson
51 pieces since 2005 — in 22 roles, at 13 companies, most often at Metropolitan Opera.
51
pieces
22
roles
13
companies
22
years
By role
Role Anckerstrom
Role Athanaël
The People’s Courtesan
Like Liza Minnelli at the Palace or Nomi Malone in Goddess, Renée Fleming‘s Thaïs is better understood as diva event than Gesamtkunstwerk. It’s an opportunity to watch a star lady do her voodoo in a work that exists largely to showcase her glamour and appeal.
divan decadence
Our Own Gualtier Maldè reports: Not every opera has to be a masterpiece. I couldn’t subsist on a steady diet of Tristan und Isolde, Die Zauberfloete, Fidelio, plus Otello, Falstaff et al. Frankly the occasional light comic bonbon or trashy but fun melodramatic tunefest makes a nice palate cleanser. I am talking Adriana Lecouvreur, La […]
Role Bishop Edvard Vergérus
The best way to spread Christmas cheer
Back to Brussels last Sunday for my third new opera of the season (after The Time of our Singing, also at La Monnaie, and Picture a day like this, at the Opéra Comique): Mikael Karlsson’s Fanny and Alexander, with a libretto by Royce Vavrek.
Role Count
Desperate housewife
As New Yorkers swelter in the Fahrenheit 90s. Trove Thursday escapes to wintry Vienna 1920s for Richard Strauss’s Intermezzo (in English) sumptuously conducted by Julius Rudel and starring the incomparable Elisabeth Söderström as the delicious, exasperating wife of Alan Titus.
Role Count Danilo
Where have all the bubbles gone?
As a whole, the evening seemed forced and a bit dispiriting.
Role Four Villains
A wasted time
Vittorio Grigolo in the title role of the Met’s revival of Les Contes d’Hoffman is the opera version of the charming homeless drunk.
Role Froila
Be careful what you ask for
When our coquine Doyenne invited those interested to review recordings I kindly requested Italian belcanto and early French works. Instead, I got a DVD of Schubert’s Alfonso und Estrella (ahem, in German!), thus the title of this review. It was one of those WTF? moments, and I thought La C. was in a PMS attack. […]
Role Germont
À l’opéra ce soir
When I was a kid growing up in Paris, there was a weekly TV broadcast of a theater play called Au Théatre Ce Soir that I loved. But that my father would rarely let me watch this show, because the plays were all were silly comedies, usually badly acted and filmed without any creativity or […]
Role Giorgio Germont
Plummeting in love
The Met’s current production of Verdi’s La Traviata is something of a mixed bag.
Face time
As we look forward to New Year’s Eve and to the gala opening of Willy Decker’s La Traviata at the Met, it seems fitting to look back—by way of the official, live, DVD recording of the production’s sensational world premiere at the Salzburg Festival in 2005—to get some sense of what’s behind all the hype. […]
Role Hadrian
Murder on the orientation express
Rufus Wainwright is determined to offer a spectacle and that intention overrides all other considerations.
Role Lindorf
Star and garters
No amount of scholarly diligence has kept Les contes d’Hoffmann from being the messiest of all standard-repertory messes.
Role Lorenzo Da Ponte
“The richest food that money can buy”
All about the life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, but depicted as an opera performed as a dress rehearsal for an opera.
Role Macbeth
And no bones!
Apparently, opera fans got the bright side of the bargain: say “Macbeth” in the theater and you court cataclysm; utter the name in the opera house and, as often as not, you merely predict disappointment.
Just around the corner
Cubes and Macbeth seem to have been a successful pairing in the recent Regietheater. Graham Vick’s production of Macbeth at the Teatro alla Scala in the 1997/98 season had become famous, or infamous, for centering its spirit and energies on a big cube dominating both sets and singers. David Pountney exploited the same idea of […]
Gaines and losses
Lyric Opera of Chicago has entrusted their new Macbeth to Barbara Gaines, Artistic Director of the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, whose work can be frustratingly inconsistent. She has directed the finest Troilus and Cressida and the finest King Lear that I have ever seen. Yet her recent work has been filled with wretched excess and effects […]
Role Mandryka
Someday she’ll come along, the girl I love
In Richard Strauss’s Arabella, the heroine is consumed with finding the right man—der Richtige—but who is the right Arabella?
Coming out
Christian Thielemann’s spirited, precise conducting and the superb, sumptuous playing of the Staatskapelle Dresden are the finest features of this strongly cast performance of Strauss’s Arabella.
Role Nixon
Rose to the occasion
The embattled Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra bring Adams and Dvorák to Carnegie Hall.
Role Old Doctor
The best thing I saw in 2025 was Vanessa
“Let me look around once more. Who knows when I shall see this house again?”
By Peter Russell
Comment
She has come, she has come
I’ve been waiting (nearly) 20 years for another encounter with Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti’s Vanessa.
Role Posa
Auto-da-fair
The Salzburg Festival has long had the image of this place where for a little over a month, the very best singers are brought together with the very best conductors and the very best directors to create the very best productions the opera world has to offer.
Role Renato
Stage animal control
Following Gundula Janowitz and Janet Baker, Chris’s Cache sends birthday greetings to another favorite diva—Karita Matilla—with a quartet of broadcasts.
Role Richard Nixon
By the (little red) book
Kent Nagano gives a boost to the Opéra national de Paris‘s revival of Nixon in China.
Role Scarpia
The art of making art
In this new Decca DVD of Tosca we find a highly intellectual, even fascinating staging at odds with the visceral nature of the original melodrama but one that inspires its cast to great heights. Robert Carsen is a clever producer with an elegant visual palette. He employs the same directorial strategy as his famous Mefistofele […]
Role The villains
All dolled up
When my editor suggested to me a round-up of my favorite recordings of Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann I was très, très, intrigued.
Role Wozzeck
Full of beans
It’s been a bitterly cold winter in NY. When it’s bitterly cold, the air is dry.
I’ll take the fall
The days are getting shorter, but you can keep the prattle going this fall’s Talk of the Town! You will, you can, you must join in the discussion about: Great mezzo soprano performances (October),
Gained in translation (November), Teleport me back to… (December).
Win a Free Ticket to Opening Night at the Met!
Quinn Kelsey and Lise Davidsen star in the Met's new Macbeth. We're giving away one ticket, so screw your courage to the sticking place and enter now!
