Brundibár at the Opéra Comique combines whimsy with historicity to sobering effect.
Supported by an ingenious production and strong performances, Antonia Bembo’s Ercole Amante makes a successful Paris Opera debut.
Matthias Pintscher’s Nuit sans aube at the Opéra Comique conjures up plenty of atmosphere — but not much else.
Ahead of their opening in Don Carlo in Dallas tonight, Christopher Corwin chats with Nicole Car and Étienne Dupuis — and offers a special edition of Chris’s Cache!
Marina Rebeka comes tantalizingly close to triumph in Cherubini’s Médée at Théâtre des Champs Elysées.
Washington Concert Opera began its 39th season last month with Christoph Willibald Gluck’s late masterpiece Iphigénie en Tauride.
It would be difficult to find a better description for Ambroise Thomas’s newly-recovered Psyché, recently heard in a new recording from Palazzetto Bru Zane, than the one uttered by her suitors: “Charmante Psyché!”
Offenbach‘s Robinson Crusoé is salvaged from obscurity.
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.
Les Brigands at the Paris Opera is an expensive joke that never lands
Carmen in Brussels is dramatically vibrant, if vocally stretched
Félix Fourdrain‘s “féerie” Les Contes de Perrault by the Frivolités Parisiennes is as fun for adults as it is for children
As tenor Pene Pati continues his Rodolfo-across-America tour, parterre box presents a snippet of his role debut as Werther from earlier this year.
Back to Rameau again this week with Samson at the Opéra Comique, my third Rameau production in as little as three months, after Les Fêtes d’Hébé in the same house, and Castor et Pollux at the Palais Garnier.
One of the highlights, if not the highlight, of No-Met-February was an all-Ravel evening presented by the Juilliard Orchestra.
The return of Cherubini‘s Medée to the Opéra Comique may be a homecoming, but Nigel Wilkinson almost went home at intermission.
What can you say, other than that everything was fab?
My first opera of the new season in Paris, after kicking off in Brussels with Kris Defoort’s thought-provoking The Day of our Singing, was another nearly-new work, totally new to me: Sir George Benjamin’s Picture a day like this.
Nigel Wilkinson reviews Kris Defoort‘s kaleidoscopic, unsettling new opera in Brussels.
Earlier this month the opera world was stunned to learn of the death of Belgian soprano Jodie Devos who died of breast cancer at just 35, and Chris’s Cache remembers her with a broadcast from last November of Devos as Ophélie in Hamlet, her only US appearance.
parterre box is excited to present again Mike Richter’s collection of recordings of Rose Ader along with this biographical tribute in honor of a significant artist whose Jewish identity perhaps prevented her from achieving the renown she deserved
Both the mise-en-scène and the musical direction amplified the absolute worst tendencies of the Opéra Comique’s Lakmé in the most tasteless and baffling ways.
The always elegant Véronique Gens has recently returned often to her earliest roots in the French baroque.
The monsoon outside was no match for the torrents of gorgeous, dramatic singing and playing that was unleashed inside George Washington University’s Lisner Hall Sunday afternoon when Washington Concert Opera, in a glorious deluge of Léo Delibes, presented Lakmé to round out its return season.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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