28 pieces since 2010 — in 12 roles, at 1 company, most often at Metropolitan Opera.
Since 1985, from the Chicago Symphony at Carnegie Hall to the Welsh National Opera visiting BAM and from Chicago Lyric to New York City Opera to the Met, I’ve never encountered a bad Falstaff—or one that didn’t astound and delight me.
A “lone voice in the wilderness” booed Barbara Frittoli’s calamitous Nedda.
This is a performance I never thought I’d see. This 2003 Met performance of Ariadne auf Naxos was filmed, but got tied up in some kind of (legal?) dispute and never televised, and I had long written it off as being tucked away in a vault, doomed to be “the lost telecast.” So it is […]
A muted and merry carousel ride out of feudalism in the Met’s production of Le nozze di Figaro
Saturday’s performance of Le nozze di Figaro at the Met mined the humor from Mozart’s divine setting of Beaumarchais’s play about a crazy day in the Almaviva household.
“The mystery of her voice gripped my soul,” Sharpless tells Pinkerton at the beginning of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. One could say the same thing of Aleksandra Kurzak’s remarkable portrayal of the title role, the main reason to catch the Met’s latest revival.
While she brought many exceptionally appealing qualities to her portrayal, Ermonela Jaho’s slender soprano often struggled to cope with Puccini’s demanding music.
Madama Butterfly remains fascinating because of its complexity.
Ana Maria Martinez’s tremendously impressive Cio-Cio-San dominated the season premiere of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly at the Met.
Der Rosenkavalier (on Blu-ray and DVD) is from the Met HD broadcast which also happened to be the final performance of the run, becoming a true souvenir of the farewells of its two leading ladies.
Any production of Der Rosenkavalier that can transform the usually excruciating first half of the third act into a hilarious romp already has my vote.
When Angela Meade and Michael Fabiano first sang Lucia together as students at AVA few would have predicted that they would go on to sing Turandot 16 years later.
The Met’s revival of Turandot on Saturday night was surprisingly contentious.
There were plenty of Turan-do’s and only a few Turandon’ts at the Met’s Turandot Sunday afternoon.
From the perspective of current identity politics, Puccini’s Turandot is a disaster of epic proportions.
Two months after my last visit to this season’s sixteen-performance run of Puccini’s Turandot, I returned eager to witness the latest chapter in the sporadic Met career of Nina Stemme. Rising stars Anita Hartig and Alexander Tsymbalyuk also appeared in their roles for the first time at the Met, so Monday evening turned into a […]
On Thursday evening Jennifer Wilson “finally” made a belated, disappointing Met debut as Turandot.
Would exciting American dramatic soprano Christine Goerke be the next great ice-princess we have been waiting for?
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.
We watch Peter Grimes being made into a deviant— a process that can take place through the mechanism of the law, but often happens outside of it through social processes.
The opera The Rake’s Progress, as many people know already, was inspired by a series of engravings and paintings of the same name by William Hogarth, showing the decline of a young man into depravity and insanity.
After an uneven gala performance of Tosca on Tuesday, I’m not sure what the Met means by “celebrating Puccini.”
A strong revival of Eugene Onegin at the Metropolitan Opera and a recital by Benjamin Bernheim offered the chance to hear “Kuda, kuda” twice in two days.
I was reminded at the Met’s season premiere of Eugene Onegin Friday night always to expect the unexpected.
Is there a more gorgeous male voice before the public today than Peter Mattei’s? Has Anna Netrebko ever sounded better?
Exclusive opera reviews, commentary, and top reads
delivered to your email weekly…ish.
