The Bible meets Edward Albee
The Met doesn’t have the monopoly on Salome this spring — look no further than Catapult Opera’s San Giovanni Battista which opens in Brooklyn next month.
New York
Entrance of the Willis
Rachel Willis-Sorensen is the winner of the 2025 Beverly Sills Award, per the Met press office
Reconcilable differences
Cameron Kelsall reports on a transcendent Jenufa from the Cleveland Orchestra
Antony and Cleopatra
John Adams‘s newest opera in a live broadcast from New York
Promising young women
Ahead of her return to the Met, soprano Corinne Winters chats with Kevin Ng about her repertoire, overcoming biases about her voice type, and how she plans to play “energetic, young women” as long as she can.
Satan keeps the beat
With tight, jazzy orchestrations, a queer-coded Mephistopheles, and sassy modern recitative, Heartbeat Opera’s fast 100-minute Faust delivers Gounod in miniature, minus some of the schmaltz.
Sweet birds of youth
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.
Up stares, down stares
Ahead of tomorrow’s Live in HD, Michael Steinberg talks Leonore, Salome, and the “endemic misogyny” of Claus Guth‘s new production
Sexual orientalization
An impressive cast blurs binaries as John Adams‘s ambitious Antony and Cleopatra arrives at the Met
Concerto barocco
Christopher Corwin on three stylish sopranos delighting audiences live in New York and on recording in a trio of new releases.
Turandot
Zubin Mehta conducts a classic broadcast from 1966 featuring Birgit Nilsson, Franco Corelli, Mirella Freni, and Bonaldo Giaiotti
Down for the Count
An uneven new cast can’t dim the glow of Richard Eyre‘s incisive Le nozze di Figaro at the Met
Dealt a bad hand
Brian Jadge will be replaced by Brandon Jovanovich in the upcoming revival of The Queen of Spades, announces the Met press office
Strawberry blonde forever
The Met Orchestra Chamber Ensemble’s Das Lied von der Erde skirts the sublime at Carnegie Hall
Frick in the sheets
The Jupiter Ensemble with Lea Desandre and Anthony Roth Costanzo offers sleek and sexy HIP inaugurates the Frick Collection’s new Stephen A. Schwartzman Auditorium
Now you Caesar, now you don’t
Before stopping at Carnegie Hall this weekend, The English Concert returned to the Bay Area last week with a fiery performance of Giulio Cesare
Little girls get bigger every day
Elza van den Heever and Peter Mattei (and the stage elevator) elevate an assertive, if not definitive, new Salome at the Met
Force of habit
Turmoil and injustice in the federal government; turmoil and grief in the Catholic Church: the time sure seems right for a staging of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites.
Ritorna vincitrice
Elina Garanca is back at the Met for the first time since 2020 — her Amneris is, in a word, sensational.
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).