I expected something lovely, but what I beheld was nothing short of magnificent.
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’s particularly bewildering that before 2013 there was no such thing as the Prototype Festival.
>”Ghastly!” — New York Observer
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is a problematic opera—or, rather, it is an opera that has, in the last century or so, become problematic.
Sooner or later, Our Own JJ gets around to discussing the Met’s Barbiere di Siviglia and Juilliard’s Turco in Italia in this week’s New York Observer.
This was the kind of night that proves the haters right: sometimes opera is boring.
“So it’s twice as disappointing that Monday night’s performance of the Mozart masterpiece turned into a four-hour fizzle.”
“I applaud the Klinghoffer protesters for voicing their opinions, but that doesn’t stop me from saying that I find those opinions ill-informed, inept and downright dangerous.”
“The sensation is that you are actually right there in the studio with Callas herself.”
Mark Morris’ staging of Acis and Galatea at Lincoln Center is everything good about summer condensed into two hours.
“The dark clouds hovering over Mr. Gelb should not obscure his very real achievements.”
“Mr. Burden did his best to wrestle with what looked like a disused Dale Chihuly chandelier, but…”
“At Carnegie Hall last Thursday, a capacity crowd witnessed what might be the final official act of a monarch who has reigned for more than four decades.”
The NY Phil Biennial, a new music festival that is dedicated to new music, kicked off its first season at a drowsy time on the performing arts calendar, the week after Memorial Day.
The Met may be missing an angle calculated to appeal to the more adventurous attendee: opera as game of chance.
“In Kristine Opolais, who gave her first Met performance in the title role on Friday night, the company has a Butterfly with the soaring voice and penetrating theatrical presence to meet Minghella’s elegant dramaturgy head on.”
The sad fact, though, is that the Met is not doing a great job or, in most cases, even a competent job at this core task.
“Opera can, in fact, be something beautiful and moving even when all a performance has going for it is some really excellent singing.”
Our Own JJ (not pictured) offers his recommendations for 10 opera and classical music events worth hearing this spring.
“The finale of Sweeney Todd left the stage of Avery Fisher Hall littered with corpses, but the evening, for all its flaws, felt vibrantly alive.”
The last place you’d expect to find opera at all, let alone good, exciting opera, is in still-scrappy Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Even when the opera performed is a masterpiece, a truly superb opera performance is exceedingly rare.
“A charming musical performance welded to a dramatic production so old and stale that, like fish left out too long, it’s starting to smell.”
Tenors Bryan Hymel (pictured) and Joseph Calleja redeem otherwise routine Puccini revivals at the Met, says Our Own JJ in the New York Observer.
