Sleepwalkers awake
La sonnambula at Teatro Nuovo overcomes uneven casting to highlight the many charms of Bellini’s bel canto masterpiece
East Coast
The bodies keep score
Music for New Bodies at Lincoln Center’s Running AMOC* Festival proves Matthew Aucoin really is everything he’s made out to be
Breaking the box
Jacquelyn Stucker talks to Kevin Ng about repertoire, tearing down the Fach system, and what it takes to make music from baroque to George Benjamin her own.
Change my mind about the Toscanini Bohème
It’s like making love with someone whose rap never ceases—and includes “helpful suggestions” about how you can be improving your game.
By Peter Russell
79 comments
Troth or dare
Chris’s Cache would argue that Prokofiev’s Betrothal in a Monastery is a much more enjoyable alternative to the pandemic-canceled Barrie Kosky The Fiery Angel
Le nozze di Picasso
Wolf Trap Opera kicked off its summer season with an inventive production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro inspired by Pablo Picasso that showcased up-and-coming singers.
Canonically ossified
When such a canonically ossified work like Verdi’s Aïda is directed at all (let alone as ambitiously as Damiano Michieletto at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino), it does feel like a completely different opera
Come on, baby, and rescue me
In Smetana‘s Dalibor, a rescue opera and a nationalistic fable collide at this year’s SummerScape Festival
Change my mind about performing operetta in English
I so don’t get why any company in the Anglophone world ever bothers to perform Continental operetta in English.
By Last Castrato
139 comments
Now and at the hour of our death
This evening of Julius Eastman at Lincoln Center was so good it hurt
The turning point
The Comet/Poppea at this summer’s Running AMOC* festival at Lincoln Center is a thrilling, startling, deeply moving experience
Turkish sound bath
A brilliant L’italiana in Algeri in Rome has Larry Wolff once again thinking about “singing Turks”
Up an Octavia
The operatic offerings of Boston Early Music Festival — Keiser‘s Octavia and Telemann‘s Pimpinone and Ino — are delectable discoveries
I, Claudio
Claudio Abbado made his Met debut on 7 October 1968 conducting Verdi’s Don Carlo, led five more performances through 14 November, and then never returned. Chris’s Cache offers the only complete recording I’ve run across from that run.
New world charm
The Met Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin surges into summer with a mixed program at Carnegie Hall
They call me the wanderer
Kent Nagano‘s and the Richard-Wagner-Akademie‘s historically informed Ring Cycle takes on Siegfried in Dresden
All about her stepmother
A new recording by the London Symphony Orchestra is the latest landmark in a spring full of Janácek‘s Jenufa
The Comet/Poppea
Yuval Sharon and the American Modern Opera Company meld Monteverdi and George Lewis in a live performance from Lincoln Center
Sea no evil
A muted production challenges a talented cast in San Francisco Opera’s Idomeneo
Charm city offensive
A starry concert Aïda in Baltimore proves unusually polished
The head on the cake plate
John Yohalem reports on Catapult Opera’s satiating San Giovanni Battista
Do you believe in life after opera?
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.
Married to the mob
Contrasting approaches to Regie duke it out in Cavalleria rusticana & Pagliacci and Rusalka in Munich
This summer I’m reading Divas and Scholars
Although presented as an overview of the performance of Italian opera from the first half of the 19th century, Divas and Scholars is really an impassioned defense of musicology as a discipline and of Italian opera as a subject worthy of scholarly attention.
By Alben Barg
53 comments
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).