Cher public is exhorted to join the Geplauder when the annual week of broadcasts from Bayreuth begins on Saturday
Daniel Barenboim’s Tristan und Isolde is a performance I keep coming back to, again and again.
Greek National Opera’s Medea in the ancient theater at Epidaurus is an intermittently rewarding exercise in nostalgia.
Like probably all of us, there are so many different things I could have submitted for a favorite Verdi performance.
Michael Spyres talks to Kevin Ng about his winding path as a baritenor, which composer he wants to conquer next, and how he makes Wagner work in his voice — and in his native Ozarks.
Lise Davidsen, Michael Spyres, and Yannick Nézet-Séguin are astonishing in Tristan und Isolde at the Met, while Yuval Sharon‘s new production is anything but.
Caitlin Vincent‘s new book Opera Wars paints a persuasive picture of the problems facing opera today, though her solutions leave something to be desired.
Jennifer Holloway, star of Salome at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, talks with Christina Colanduoni about re-launching her career as a soprano and how her Salome is “just trying not to disappear under everybody else’s rule.”
A new production of Parsifal at San Francisco Opera stirred something deep inside Michael Anthonio about how music soothes the soul
Nowhere are the contradictions between Wagner’s small-mindedness, his meanness of spirit, and his human insight on clearer display than in Hans Sachs monologue Wahn, Wahn überall Wahn in the third Act of Mesitersinger.
Dame Gwyneth Jones as Brünnhilde pretty much started it all for me.
Tobias Kratzer‘s Das Rheingold in Munich kicks off a Ring for the post-secular age
Valentin Schwarz‘s and Simone Young‘s Ring, in its final outing at Bayreuth, is dramaturgically messy and musically excellent.
I suppose Der fliegende Holländer is my favorite Wagner opera — a riveting masterpiece from start to finish, dramatically and musically.
The final installment of the 2025 Ring from Bayreuth
Matthias Davids‘s reactionary new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg might be fun, but no one comes to Bayreuth for fun.
A slightly delayed broadcast of the second installment of this year’s Ring from Bayreuth
A live broadcast of the first installment of this summer’s Ring from Bayreuth
A live broadcast of the opening of the 2025 Bayreuth Festival
Opera Director and Detroit Opera Artistic Director Yuval Sharon begins his recent book A New Philosophy of Opera by imagining a future – some forty to fifty years from now – in which opera ceases to exist as an art form.
Asmik Grigorian’s scorching turn in Il trittico in Paris has Nigel Wilkinson wondering, ‘what is it that makes Americans so weepy?’
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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