The 55th New York Film Festival presented the world premiere of Susan Froemke’s marvelous new documentary The Opera House in a special one-time-only screening at the Metropolitan Opera.
Tack on a little symphonic Beethoven and some particularly zany hosting patter from Bernadette Peters, and you start to lose focus, or at least some sense of, um, what matters mostly.
“Trove Thursday” provides a live broadcast of Mozart’s rarely performed cantata Davide Penitente by Les Arts Florissants conducted by William Christie.
Anticipation of events like the Metropolitan Opera’s 50th Anniversary bash turns me back into the newly opera-soused kid who begged his parents to let him watch the highlights of the Bing Gala on the family color television.
Let’s call this meeting to order. My name is Patrick and I’m a boxset-aholic.
It’s easy to see why Leonard Bernstein’s Candide was a flop when it premiered on Broadway.
Idomeneo proved enormously moving while a much more complicated Così fan Tutte went for shallow romantic hijinks stripping that work of its darkly ambiguous disturbing view of love.
The unevenly-beating Heart unfortunately proved less than the sum of its deluxe parts.
Shirley Verrett remains one of my all-time favorite artists, and I am pleased to introduce her to my Mixcloud site in one of her parade roles: the femme fatale in Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila.
Subtitled by its creators as “A Fearful Radio Show,” this opera reminded Jerome Robbins of Orson Welles’ 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds.
Have you ever had the unfortunate experience of listening to someone tell a joke badly?
“Trove Thursday” steps in with one of René Jacobs’s favorite and rarest rediscoveries, Francesco Conti’s marvelous Don Chisciotte in Sierra Morena from 1719.
What we really need, some seem to believe, is fuller representation of the 19th century.
Maria Agresta‘s delicately-acted, sumptuously-sung seamstress transformed what might have been just an average Wednesday night revival into something finer.
William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants made a much-anticipated appearance at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival Saturday performing Theodora.
Few new operas have received the near-unanimous acclaim that has greeted Written on Skin since its first performance at the 2012 Aix-en-Provence Festival.
The redevelopment that took place at Lincoln Center during Reynold Levy’s tenure as president of Lincoln Center represents a considerable accomplishment.
Many large opera companies these days host valuable young artist programs dedicated to helping singers negotiate the difficult transition between leaving the conservatory and becoming full-time performing artists.
New York City isn’t a bad place to live, operatically-speaking.
Mark Morris’ staging of Acis and Galatea at Lincoln Center is everything good about summer condensed into two hours.
Coming as Peter Gelb did from the music industry, opera lovers hoped that he would display a more distinctive knack for casting and an improved talent pipeline than Joe Volpe offered during the waning years of his tenure.
What must have raced through the mind of the none-too-comely Spanish Infanta when she learned that the opera to be performed during the celebrations for her 1745 wedding to the French Dauphin revolved around the comeuppance of an ugly yet vain water nymph tricked into believing Jupiter was her ardent suitor?
For one week every two years since 1981 the eyes—and ears—of those interested in period performance turn to the Boston Early Music Festival, particularly to its opera centerpiece, but that organization doesn’t rest on its laurels in between festivals.
The Met’s financial challenges are not meteorological, demographic, or cyclical; they are structural.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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