Old friends, new friends
Les Arts Florissants present two ravishing programs in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
BAM
Masques et bergamasques
John Yohalem wraps up Donizetti Month at parterre box with a look back at nearly six decades of Donizetti operagoing.
Brutal Desire
David Fox and Cameron Kelsall review Rebecca Frecknall’s new staging of A Streetcar Named Desire at BAM, “a gripping realization that makes new a play many of us feel we know inside out.”
Park and “Bark”
Taylor Mac isn’t known for being short-winded.
Spouse of pain
Dame Janet Baker turns 87 tomorrow and Trove Thursday celebrates with Handel’s rare Admeto conducted by the great Sir Anthony Lewis in which Baker’s bold Alceste vies with Sheila Armstrong’s sparkling Antigona for her deluded husband Admeto’s affections.
Sexy and sinewy
Having just watched and written about the famous Actors Studio Three Sisters, it also feels right to turn now to The Cherry Orchard—Chekhov’s final play—in a production from the BBC.
Constant surveillance
It’s 2020, Ivo’s the new Ethel Merman, and I caught a preview of his fourth Broadway show and first Broadway musical, West Side Story.
The harsh untruth of the camera eye
Ivo van Hove really seems to be everywhere lately.
A boy’s best friend
At the opening of the Scottish Opera’s 2017 production of Turnage’s opera Greek, I was very sorry I’d missed Anna Nicole.
Scrumptious and relatable
I had a panic attack, that’s how moved you made me.
Drunk in both head and heart
This week’s “Trove Thursday” offers Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice featuring Anthony Rolfe Johnson.
One finger exercise
David Lang is, per The New Yorker, a “postminimalist enfant terrible.”
Outskirts
As One is an opera about a boy growing up to discover that he is a girl.
The Met: what’s really wrong?
The Met’s financial challenges are not meteorological, demographic, or cyclical; they are structural.
Billy’s club
When Winston Churchill was First Sea Lord, the story goes, an indignant admiral accused him of violating British naval tradition, to which Churchill replied that the only traditions of the British Navy were rum, sodomy and the lash.
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).