For those with Odyssey fever, this week’s Grand Tier Grab Bag item features a performance of another ancient epic: Les Troyens with Russell Thomas.
Greek National Opera’s Medea in the ancient theater at Epidaurus is an intermittently rewarding exercise in nostalgia.
Christopher Corwin speaks to rising bass-baritone Le Bu about his journey from Yancheng, China to the Met (with a stop in Wichita) and what important roles await him.
Grand Tier Grab Bag hearkens back to the days when Sondra Radvanovsky — who is singing no Verdi at all next season — seemed like the Verdi soprano of reference.
Lyric Opera of Chicago announces its 2026-27 season.
Madama Butterfly confronts anime, virtual reality, and weeaboos in Matthew Ozawa‘s bold production at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
El último sueño de Frida y Diego at the Lyric Opera of Chicago is a visual and sonic wonder, but a weak libretto dampens its effect.
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.”
Salome sweeps in like a storm at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
Nearly three years after the premiere of François Girard’s Lohengrin at the Met, Parterre Box looks back at the production with a duet from Piotr Beczala and Elena Stikhina.
Carl Orff’s cantata tries its fortunes at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci at Lyric Opera of Chicago are hysterical in all the wrong ways.
Seeing Sondra Radvanovsky as Medea at Lyric Opera of Chicago sprawled across the floor, soaked in her children’s blood, is proof that we’re witnessing an utterly haunting singer-actor.
West Side Story opened LA Opera’s 40th anniversary season with fury and flair
The 25th anniversary revival of Dead Man Walking at San Francisco Opera is most moving in its quietest moments
I’d never heard Götterdämmerung in a live performance until 1985 at The Dallas Opera. OMG, so long ago!
Contrasting approaches to Regie duke it out in Cavalleria rusticana & Pagliacci and Rusalka in Munich
In a satanic panic, this week Chris’s Cache presents trio of performances of Mefistofele
Missy Mazzoli has established herself as one of contemporary opera’s most skilled and subtle architects of emotional response, and her latest, The Listeners—now at the Lyric Opera of Chicago—is no exception.
Before this weekend, I never thought I would want to leave an opera by Act I. The recent production of Puccini’s La bohème at the Lyric Opera of Chicago taught me that there’s a first time for everything.
Lyric Opera of Chicago has announced its 2025-26 season, its first complete one under its new General Director, President & CEO John Mangum.
My first introduction to Béla Bartók’s one-act opera Bluebeard’s Castle was the musicologist Susan McClary’s infamous book Feminine Endings. Here, McClary likened her search of a feminist musicology to Judith’s journey through the seven doors; a journey that ends in Judith’s symbolic death.
In 2011, Sondra Radvanovsky‘s Tosca proved promising; fourteen years later, it was absolutely magnificent, a completely satisfying musical and dramatic embodiment of a challenging role by an artist at the peak of her powers.
American opera and its institutions are experiencing an identity crisis. Nowhere is this clearer than in Tazewell Thompson and Jeanine Tesori’s Blue.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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