Washington National Opera offered a searing production of Robert Ward’s opera The Crucible, directed by WNO Artistic Director Francesca Zambello, as the second installment in the company’s next chapter.
Brendan Latimer sits down with Francesca Zambello and members of the cast of Washington National Opera’s production of Aïda to discuss the complicated legacy of one of Verdi’s most beloved works and the tricky business of “inventing the truth.”
West Side Story opened LA Opera’s 40th anniversary season with fury and flair
Wolf Trap Opera concluded its 2025 summer season last month with a production of Carmen that was vocally strong, though not entirely dramatically satisfying, amid challenging weather.
Needing a Mozart palate-cleanser after the recent misbegotten Marriage of Figaro, I went back more than two decades for a Houston Così fan Tutte featuring then-rising Americans Christine Goerke, Joyce Di Donato, Richard Croft, and Nathan Gunn as the confused lovers.
Love makes fools of us all – that seems to be the theme of this summer’s Glimmerglass Festival.
Too young to be in love. But not too young to go to war or to die.
Opera at the Kennedy Center has been in hibernation this winter.
Rosa Feola, hailed last year for her Gilda at the Met, brought a level of vocal refinement and elegance to Juliet that substantially elevated the night’s proceedings.
In Handel’s Rodelinda, a usurped monarch, believed dead, returns to avenge his deposition and reclaim the woman he loves.
Okay, let’s get the silly jokes out of the way first. Around our house, we’ve been referring to this alternately as Merrily We Bohemians Roll Along, or Emèhob Al.
The New York City Opera has become an elusive “now you see it, now you don’t” presence in the New York opera scene since the departure of main sponsor and chairman of the board Roy G. Niederhoffer in 2019.
Only three years separate the creation of The Most Happy Fella (1956) and The Sound of Music (1959), but there’s a proverbial ocean between these two Golden Age musicals are being performed at prestigious festivals this summer.
Next Wednesday is the composer’s 337th birthday, so Trove Thursday previews this spring’s most enticing Handel performance with two very different live versions of his delightful Serse,.
Ordinarily we’d be listening to Bayreuth Festival broadcasts this week but instead Trove Thursday steps up with a true Wagner rarity: Die Feen from the Wiener Staatsoper starring as Ada, the fairy in love with a mortal, Gundula Janowitz, who turns 83 on Sunday.
Can a work with indisputably great music fail to add up to a successful opera? I puzzled over that Sunday during Teatro Nuovo’s essential concert staging of Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra at SUNY Purchase.
The Glimmerglass Festival premiered a searing examination of race, identity, and the fraught relationship between communities of color and law enforcement. Blue, with a score by Jeanine Tesori and libretto by Tazewell Thompson.
In our current political climate with issues of immigration, tribalism, and white nationalists, the 1957 musical West Side Story has a distinctly contemporary feel.
It’s high time we see Funny Girl through a different lens.
Sunny, lakeside Cooperstown presents a peppy, exuberant, winning production of West Side Story, the musical.
I mean, how often does one get to hear Bernstein’s gorgeous, rollicking, and varied score nursed by a full orchestra and the artistic resources of an opera company?
The arrival of a new recording of Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello into the catalogue, to say nothing of a new tenor capable of singing Otello, is generally cause for hosannas all around in operatic circles.
The turntable set looks much the same from any angle: gutted concrete tenements and perilous alleys, instantly recognizable as a scene of urban guerrilla mayhem.
The late-mid 1730s were transitional years for Handel, to put it nicely.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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