Put your hands together for Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who has been named Musical America‘s Artist of the Year.
“But enough about Lou Tellegen,” Miss Farrar snapped.
Our old friend Heather Mac Donald (not pictured) is back, ostensibly to mourn the loss of ‘Petrarchan intimacy with the past’ in the study of the humanities, but, reliably enough, she can’t help taking a swipe at Regietheater while she’s at it.
Our Own JJ weighs in at some length about OONY’s performance of I Lombardi over at musicalamerica.com.
Our Own JJ‘s nominee for 2012 Newsmaker of the Year: the Met’s Peter Gelb.
Our Own JJ (not pictured) is delighted and humbled—well, delighted anyway…
“Since no opera company in the U.S. has quite got up the courage to present a Herheim production, this webcast offers us a chance to sample this director’s unique style of Regie.”
“After putting off for a week trying to make some sense of the horrific mess that is the Met’s new Faust, I’m finally just going to give up. There are some disasters that bear writing about as what you might call teaching opportunities: this season’s Don Giovanni, for example, as a cautionary tale about the…
“Now that it has become apparent that Robert Lepage‘s production of the Ring at the Met is a fiasco (too soon? Nah.)… well, anyway, since arguably the production is a dreary, unworkable, overpriced mess whose primary (perhaps only) virtue is that it actually hasn’t killed anyone yet, and since, let’s face it, the Machinecentric show turned out to be so mind-bogglingly…
“The critical reaction to the Robert Lepage’s new production of Die Walküre at the Met leaves this contrarian reviewer in something of a quandary. Not only was pretty much everybody underwhelmed, but there was a consensus about what (they thought) was wrong: the clunkiness of The Machine, the lack of poetry in the latter part of the…
“It’s fortunate that Lulu at Den Norske Opera was the last stop on the ‘Regietournee,’ because honestly anything after that would have amounted to an anticlimax. If there is a more brilliant director working in opera today than Stefan Herheim, well, maybe I shouldn’t see any of his work, because it might be too much…
Our Own JJ (not pictured) gets the Staatsoper Stuttgart experience off his chest, to the tune of about 4,000 words, in his new blog post at Musical America. Included is a massive and (one hopes) final deconstruction of the Calixto Bieito Parsifal.
Our own JJ (not pictured) has finally begun to unburden himself on the subject of the recent, much-discussed “Regietournee.” For reviews of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Rusalka and Cosi fan tutte in Berlin, please go to Musical America‘s Rough and Regie. (Photo: Monkia Rittershaus)
Former Editor of Opera News and Director of Opera-Music Theater at the National Endowment for the Arts Patrick J. Smith (pictured) yearns for the ancien régime: “We used to go to the opera for the voices. Zinka Milanov…” And so, anyone who has serious informed criticism of how Peter Gelb runs the Met now can…
Our Own JJ salutes three sister bloggers (of whom only one is female) in his current Rough and Regie column at Musical America.
“Decker’s vision of Traviata, like most great productions, combines emotional truth with intellectual rigor—or, rather, there is a synergy between these two qualities that illuminates the entire work.” Our Own JJ takes apart the giant watch to find out what makes it tick, over at Musical America.
Our Own JJ (pictured) reveals what makes him cry. [Musical America]
“The main culprit here is director Giancarlo Del Monaco (and by extension, his enablers Plácido Domingo, Joseph Volpe and Mrs. Donald Harrington), since, like the other four Del Monaco stagings at the Met in the early 1990s, this Fanciulla concentrates on massive naturalistic sets and superficial coups de theater at the expense of subtle characterization…
Is Our Own JJ turning Neocon? He certainly has some very positive things to say about the “conservative” Don Carlo in his latest “Rough and Regie” offering! [Musical America] (Photograph: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera.)
“Revival. Strange word, and creepy, when you think about it. Something used to be alive, then it wasn’t and now (presumably) it is, again. But it’s that last step, the actual reviving that seems so often to elude the revival of an opera production.” [Musical America]
Our Own JJ delves into the mysteries of time travel—as it relates to opera production, of course. [Musical America]
“A few critics hosannaed ‘Thanks be to Great God Lenny for smooching us once more with his plump, moist genius,’ but the majority echoed Cecil B. DeMille’s tactful reaction to Norma Desmond’s bizarre comeback screenplay, “There are some good things in it…’” Our Own JJ reflects on Christopher Alden‘s direction of A Quiet Place at…
In what may be 2008’s most stellar example of unintentional irony, the organization Opera America has elected as its new chairman … a Brit. According to musicalamerica.com, Anthony Freud, newcomer General Director and CEO of the Houston Grand Opera, will succeed Opera Theater of St. Louis General Director Charles MacKay. Opera America President Marc Scorca deemed…
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.
