The Great Domingo Question loomed above all other topics in the sleepy month of August.
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.
It was already nearly two o’clock in the morning, late for a work night, and Nixon Ben Mahmoud was ashamed to find himself crying real tears.
It’s a fairly traditional post-Patrice-Chereau Ring, set during the Industrial Revolution.
Opera Vlaanderen opened its 2017-18 season with a rare staging of Korngold’s Das Wunder der Heliane.
From up close, the miked opera singer can be a bit tough to take.
Angels in America reimagined as an actual, full-blown opera.
anatomy theater, receiving its New York premiere Saturday night at this year’s Prototype Festival, is a conceptual exercise in which nothing, absolutely nothing is left to the imagination.
I can think of no other role that provides the most unique promise of humiliation, and consequently the most opportunity for glory.
Highlights of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2019-2020 season, according the always intriguing Met Future Wiki.
Which opera director’s new position seems to have gone to his head? At a recent round of auditions, he reportedly encouraged the singers to disrobe.
“But enough about Lou Tellegen,” Miss Farrar snapped.
La Cieca (not pictured) surrenders, cher public: she can no longer bear the burden of opposing ignorant, hysterical pearl-clutching on the internet. The clutchers have won.
Fans of the “context-free laundry list” school of opera criticism will be happy to know that “the world’s preeminent philosopher in the field of aesthetics,” Roger Scruton, has now shouldered the white man’s burden of rescuing opera from interpretation.
As is happening increasingly in opera productions today (e.g., the Rosenkavalier in Stuttgart), the action of Moses und Aron at the Komische Oper begins some minutes before the music does.
A problem with scheduling an opera-intensive trip is that you don’t always hear and see the shows in optimum order.
A performance space called the Sheen Center has opened its doors way down the far end of Bleecker Street, a stoner’s throw from where CBGB’s used to thrive beside the itsy-bitsy Amato Opera House. (You never forget your first Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio.) Sheen Center, sizable and modern and slim on personality, contains two…
“Michael Volle is not into bling,” begins an article in ACT-O, the glossy magazine of the Grand Théâtre de Genève.
Karita Mattila is a gift to this planet.
At what moment does a “rising star” become simply a “star”?
Cher public, you may remember that about 18 years ago a parterre writer called Dr. Repertoire came up with a handy list of rules for stage directors.
George Benjamin’s 2012 opera Written on Skin received great acclaim at its opening at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, and the Royal Opera quickly mounted it in March 2013.
So, cher public, have you heard about this fabulous new plan to revive the New York City Opera under the direction of Michael Capasso?
In the interest of absolute accuracy (for surely the cher public deserves no less!) La Cieca offers the following correction.
At last, the quintessential targeted reader of parterre.com has been identified.
