Buoyed by a strong cast, The Metropolitan Opera continues its autumn bel canto streak with a winning revival of Donizetti’s La fille du regiment.
Buoyed by a cast of emerging stars, the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of Il Barbiere di Siviglia asserted a key trait of this ubiquitous buffo: it is a young person’s opera.
Fidelio, which opened last week at the Metropolitan Opera, will always be relevant, I fear.
On June 11th, the Met Orchestra returned to Carnegie Hall with a diverse program led by music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
When it premiered at the Opéra Comique in 1875, Carmen shocked audiences with its frank depictions of female sexuality, the proletariat, and violence: subjects that have ensured the piece’s continued relevance and that have inspired numerous retellings and revisions.
The past seems to be in conversation with the present.
It’s not hard not to feel jaded about Romeo and Juliet.
One got a sense that the Met and the maestro directed most of the rehearsal and preparation toward the opening night premiere of the Heggie opus
Old opera productions at the end of their performing life can be sad affairs.
To paraphrase Terence Blanchard’s Champion, what makes an opera an opera?
It seems that François Girard has been watching a little too much Star Wars lately. His new production of Lohengrin, which opened at the Metropolitan Opera Sunday afternoon, reduced Wagner’s opera to a knockoff space opera, full of hackneyed sci-fi tropes and B-rated futurist apologue.
After putting a hiatus on their awards in 2020 and 2021 (for reasons that are all too well-known to all of us), the Richard Tucker Foundation Gala returned on Sunday evening November 13 honoring soprano Angel Blue the 2022 Award winner.
Eleanora Buratto at this fully matured point of her career has a warm, creamy full lyric soprano that has the roundness and sweet warmth of a Freni but can also expand into the spinto power of a Tebaldi.
This sterling revival shows the Metropolitan to be surviving well and in good shape.
With composer Terence Blanchard and librettist Kasi Lemmons‘ incendiary Fire Shut Up in My Bones, the Met makes long overdue history and Will Liverman ascends to superstardom.
Elina Garanca was radiantly present at Carnegie Hall Friday night performing a ravishingly somber Rückert-Lieder with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the MET Orchestra.
Cycle II represented an embarrassment of musical riches.
Austin McCormack‘s lascivious choreography outshone a tepid and tedious staging of Saint-Saëns’s old-testament epic.
Madama Butterfly remains fascinating because of its complexity.
At the center of the Met’s revival of Puccini’s La bohème, one found the rich and layered talent of Angel Blue.
In Schikaneder’s patriarchal cosmology, darkness is the province of emotional women—not just the erratic fury of the Queen of the Night, but the pathetic supplications of Pamina as well.
“Trove Thursday” presents Janet Baker in Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde from 1970 partnered by Jess Thomas and conducted by Josef Krips.
A poster outside Carnegie Hall proclaimed “Mahler Well Met” and to some degree it proved to be true.
Someone—a deranged purist no doubt—heckled Javier Camarena from the balcony of the opera house for withholding the infamous high F during “Credeasi, misera.”
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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