This Billy Budd would have worked better with a stronger set of singers.
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.
Some days you can feel like a hero just getting out of bed in the morning.
An understudy saved the show at the Met’s La Traviata Friday night, but no star was born.
When the hard-partying heroine of Massenet’s Manon hits bottom, she literally lands in the gutter.
Now New York City Opera has given us a “Così Fan Tutte” starring the undead.
When Verdi’s Macbeth returned to the Met Thursday night, miscasting doomed the revival as surely as any witch’s curse.
“Juan Diego Flórez made an untraditional Nemorino, his small but diamond-bright tenor unlike the luscious lyric voice usually heard in this part.”
“In a season of high-profile duds like Don Giovanni and the Ring, the Met has found a winner in a dark horse, Mussorgsky’s moody Khovanshchina.”
“With Anjelica Huston, Parker Posey and Yoko Ono dotting the crowd at BAM Sunday afternoon, the New York City Opera’s premiere of Prima Donna offered more diva presence offstage than on.”
“New York City Opera performed La Traviata at BAM Sunday afternoon. That’s who, what, where and when. But this was a performance without a ‘why’.”
“No tenors, no arias, no orchestra pit, no plot. Can You, My Mother really be called an opera?”
Our Own JJ gets into the traditional holiday mood, journalist style, by cobbling together a listicle of last-minute shopping options. [New York Post]
“In an unlikely venue—a converted gymnasium off Avenue B—one of New York’s newest opera companies is keeping musical tradition alive.” [New York Post]
“An atomic explosion kicked off the last act of Gounod’s Faust Tuesday at the Met, but the production as a whole was more dud than bomb.” [New York Post]
“Rumors were that an ‘Occupy’-something group would disrupt Wednesday night’s US premiere of Kommilitonen! But the Juilliard Opera performance went off without offstage fireworks, and proved to be a well-crafted and moving meditation on student activism.” [New York Post] (Photo: Nan Melville)
Open your eyes, sleepyheads! In the news this morning, our own JJ raves about Satyagraha at the Met (“a masterpiece of musical and visual art”); the ever-articulate Nico Muhly takes aim at the Met’s production values (“Mercedes Bass or Anne Ziff paid for the opera. What do you think is going to happen?”); and NYCO’s…
“It’s the understudy’s job to save the show, and that’s just what Jay Hunter Morris did Thursday at the Met in the daunting title role of Wagner’s Siegfried.” [New York Post]
“An eagerly awaited production of Mozart’s masterpiece Don Giovanni —staged by Tony winner Michael Grandage (Red)—limped into the Met Thursday dead on arrival.” [New York Post]
“Her catfight with another princess over the emperor’s crown might have been an outtake from The Real Housewives of Babylon.” [New York Post] (Photo: Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera)
“Queen Anna is dead — long live Queen Anna! The late royal lady is Anna Bolena in Donizetti’s 1830 opera, based on the final days of Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII. The new monarch — ruling not over England but the Met — is Anna Netrebko, whose radiant performance at the company’s opening…
Well, actually, it appears Michael Riedel was misinformed. (Alert the media!) The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess is, in fact, coming to Broadway. [New York Times]
This just in from La Cieca’s old, old, old friend Michael Riedel: it looks like the “new” Porgy and Bess isn’t coming into New York. Says the NYP gossipmonger: “…while [Audra] McDonald wins Tonys, her name doesn’t sell tickets. I’m told the producers are likely to fold the show after its Boston run.”
La Cieca (left) is delighted to congratulate dear Alex Ross (right), whose little column The Rest is Noise has been named #1 among Classical Music blogs, according to blogrank. In other family news, Our Own JJ (not pictured) reviews Caramoor’s Guillaume Tell in today’s New York Post.
“Subtract the magic and the flute from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and you’d think there’d be nothing. But an adaptation of this opera at the Lincoln Center Festival on Wednesday conjured a quiet enchantment.” [New York Post]
