Whether you love the 2018 Berlin Staatsoper Tristan and Isolde depends on what you think the opera is about.
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.
Highlights of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2019-2020 season, according the always intriguing Met Future Wiki.
A Court of Appeals in Paris has ordered BelAir Classiques to remove from its catalog a video recording of Dialogues des carmélites as staged by Dmitri Tcherniakov for the Bayerische Staatsoper.
For all their orchestral and vocal attractions, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s 15 operas are rarities in the West.
Coming as Peter Gelb did from the music industry, opera lovers hoped that he would display a more distinctive knack for casting and an improved talent pipeline than Joe Volpe offered during the waning years of his tenure.
Even when the opera performed is a masterpiece, a truly superb opera performance is exceedingly rare.
First video snippets of the new Prince Igor are now live on the Met’s website.
How, then, to explain the perplexing performance last Friday night of Falstaff, Mr. Levine’s first new production since his return?
So we may all be on the same page as we discuss, following the jump is the video of the December 7 Traviata from La Scala.
The surprises, and puzzles, of Dmitri Tcherniakov‘s production of Don Giovanni in this DVD of a performance at the Aix-en-Provence festival begin before a note has been played or the curtain has risen.
La Cieca has been wining, dining and otherwise wooing her Met connection (pictured above) and he (or is it she?) has come across with some tidbits about upcoming seasons at Casa Gelb.
La Cieca hears that the opening night of La Scala’s 2013 season will feature a new production of La traviata starring Diana Damrau and Piotr Beczala, directed by… no, not Franco Zeffirelli, but Dmitri Tcherniakov.
La Cieca predicts you won’t be seeing any puritans at the Met next season, except of course for the ones who slouch around during intermission hissing, “You call that a trill?”
La Cieca has been sniffing around her generally reliable (and fragrant) sources, and she thinks she has pieced together a list of the dozen operas to be featured in the 2013-2014 season of “The Met: Live in HD.”
No, not a Regie quiz—though that feature will return soon enough now that the season is up and running—but rather an image from the new Dmitri Tcherniakov production of Jenufa for the Opernhaus Zürich.
Coming up over the next two weekends: a pair of streamed video performances sure to provide plenty of chat fodder.
That most operatic of all operas, Il trovatore, has been done many ways, but here’s a first: the warhorse as bottle episode.
