A high-drama Vanessa by the Boston Symphony Orchestra offers something to believe in.
This Bard production, led by Leon Botstein, makes the strongest possible case musically, dramatically and visually for Smetana’s opera Dalibor.
The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs at the Kennedy Center: not a poorly made opera, but so relentlessly mid.
It surprises even me how some operas have eluded me in live performance even after lo, these many years. One of them is Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette.
My vision may have been slightly blurry at the end.
Folks who have never attended a full-length, uncut Giacomo Meyerbeer grand opera have been known to pout and ponder: Why did the most popular opera composer of the mid-nineteenth century all but vanish from the stages of the world after a hundred years?
When it premiered at the Opéra Comique in 1875, Carmen shocked audiences with its frank depictions of female sexuality, the proletariat, and violence: subjects that have ensured the piece’s continued relevance and that have inspired numerous retellings and revisions.
This Carmen, in other words, was somewhat less radical than its initial image suggested.
Bay Area composer Mason Bates’s and librettist Mark Campbell’s contemporary opera about the life of the tech mogul Steve Jobs came home “to the place where it all began” in spectacular fashion
Reunited and it feels so good!
Composer Garrett Fisher and librettist Ellen McLaughlin’s Blood Moon wears its themes on its sleeve to great success in this spellbinding new opera.
Tosca, as it exists now, can’t be real, spontaneous drama-it’s just Camp.
Joel Puckett and Minnesota Opera hit it out of the park.
The Barber of Seville turned out to be the most overall solid production of the year and even a bit of old-fashioned fun.
Operatic history can be cruel where multiple works with the same subject are concerned
WNO premiered Better Gods, an hour-long work by composer Luna Pearl Woolf and librettist Caitlin Vincent on Friday evening.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
×
Sign up for Parterre’s free newsletter.
Exclusive opera reviews, commentary, and top reads
delivered to your email weekly…ish.