The celebrated ‘Triumph’ scene… borders on homoerotic porn.
“Mr. Levine was conducting his beloved Wagner for what was almost certainly the last time.”
“Friday night’s triumph may well leave the Met’s management wondering how it let such a gem slip through its fingers.”
“Mr. Eyre’s production… was just another in a series of ugly, gargantuan stagings signaling the Met’s endemic lack of imagination or artistic ambition.”
New York City Opera Renaissance’s Tosca “was opera at its most retrograde, an effort to recreate a golden age from a handful of tinsel.”
Our Own JJ confesses he just doted on Heartbreak Express, but “You Us We All was not my cup of twee.”
Continuing coverage of the Met’s new Alban Berg spectacular.
“Puccini’s Tosca is what is known in the trade as a ‘bread and butter’ opera.”
“Everyone complains about how there is no great singing in opera anymore, but last week’s performances suggest that’s not so. The singing today is mostly fine; it’s everything else that’s the problem.”
“Along with every other music journalist in New York, I was blindsided by this news. If ever there was a company that appeared the picture of fiscal and artistic good health, it was Gotham.”
“This throwback to the golden age of opera—superhuman singing greeted with frenzied ovations—was a function of a perfect storm of excitement.”
Read and heed!
“Those kids in Bushwick have this opera thing figured out.”
Part of what makes opera seem, at least, a camp art form is that fans of the genre have such inconsistent taste.
For instance, the mule is more intelligent and more patient than its parents the horse and the donkey.
“New York is great. Opera is great. They deserve each other. So what can we do to get them together? Who can show us how it’s done? We need to ask the Germans.”
Our Own JJ reviews Orlando and Early Shaker Spirituals in the Observer.
Our Own JJ was only semi-amused.
Our Own JJ crunches the numbers at the Met and LoftOpera in the New York Observer.
“’They’re young… they’re in love… and they kill people’ goes the tagline for the 1968 film Bonnie and Clyde, but the slogan could apply almost as well to the outlaw pair at the center of the Metropolitan Opera’s white-hot revival of Massenet’s Manon.”
Donkey dick and other Asian Fusion vaudeville acts arouse “The BAM Effect” at Handel’s Semele.
“It was the chilliest opening night at the Met in years on Monday—barely 15 degrees when the curtain went up on the company premiere of La Donna del Lago.“
“If Mozart had only had the sense to write Don Giovanni in a… single-performer format, last Wednesday’s revival at the Met would have been one for the ages.
“Don’t bother with The Loft or The Boy Next Door: the most spine-chilling thriller currently playing isn’t on the screen of your local multiplex but on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.”
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.
