Minutes into “An die Nacht,” the first song Friday night, I realized how much I’d missed being enveloped in that seductive Straussian combination of a soprano (or two or three) rising higher and higher over a surging orchestra.
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.
Emanuel Ax, Anderson Cooper, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Katie Couric, Renée Fleming, David Foster, Josh Groban, John Lithgow, Kelli O’Hara, Stephen Sondheim, Emma Thompson and John Williams are among the special guests.
If only she’d been able to sing more than 10 minutes of Bjork’s music!
Do we do what we have to do? Or do we have to do what we do?
Wednesday night’s New York Philharmonic concert was a high-stakes performance for a number of reasons.
Broadway star Kelli O’Hara stepped out of her comfort zone.
It is always a pleasure to hear a great orchestra take on a major score that might sound half-muffled emerging from the pit of an opera house.
Tonight’s program at the New York Philharmonic, Arthur Honegger’s massive oratorio dramatique Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher, has been an occasional visitor to the orchestra’s repertoire starting with the performance conducted by Charles Munch in January of 1948.
Show Boat continues to communicate, even in the less than perfect circumstances of this latest revival.
If you are of the belief that Show Boat can stand on its own as a classic score and thus doesn’t need the trappings of musical production, you’ll love the New York Philharmonic’s “semi-staged” production.
“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.”
Our Own JJ has been spending a lot of time outdoors lately, which is such a novelty for him that he felt he really must write about it.
I had every reason to think I’d love the New York Phil’s production of The Cunning Little Vixen as much as I did their staging of Le Grand Macabre with the same creative team.
“A singing crossbreed—a fox with human intelligence—stars in Leos Janacek’s opera, The Cunning Little Vixen. If only the New York Philharmonic’s semistaged performance Wednesday night were as successful a hybrid.” [New York Post]
