I’m going with four outstanding, deeply personal NYC recitals
I had the pleasure of going with some members of the Pittsburgh Opera to the PROTOTYPE Festival in New York at the start of the year- almost unfortunate it was so early on in 2025 because it set my expectations for the year so high!
It’s a dazzling, shocking, and entertaining 100 minutes – one of the best new operas I’ve seen.
I still don’t think Sunset Boulevard is a top-tier musical but it was by far the most memorable vocal performance I saw in 2025.
Elina Garanča scaled the vocal and dramatic summits of the Judgement Duet and Scene in the May series of Aïda.
A staged Freischütz is rare enough in itself to be the highlight of any opera season, but it was in Christoph Marthaler‘s Antwerp production that I connected with the characters and felt the story for the first time.
Houston Grand Opera’s 2025 Breaking the Waves was absolutely my highlight of the year!
In the spring, The English Concert completed a three-city tour performing a concert version of Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto.
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
