Immersive theater can be vexing—take it from a critic who’s slogged through productions set on sinking long-tail boats and in allergenic warehouses—but this year’s been a grand one for location-specific opera. Read more »
Immersive theater doesn’t do opera singers many favors. Like a photonegative of theatre in the round, it forces performers into an up-close-and-personal relationship with their audience and breaks down the fourth wall, lending most spectators an HD view of everyone’s tonsils. Singing technique, usually kept at a safe distance onstage, is here made loudly, oppressively available. Read more »
Director Ivo van Hove, in collaboration with Flemish opera company Muziektheater Transparant, brings his trademark physicality and stripped-down aesthetic to bear on Leoš Janáček‘s “pathbreaking, emotionally raw song cycle” (The New York Times) Diary of One Who Disappeared. Featuring bravura performances by tenor Andrew Dickinson and mezzo-soprano Marie Hamard and additional music by composer Annelies Van Parys, BAM presents the US Premiere of this contemporary update April 4—6 at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House.
In 1917, Czech composer Janáček became obsessed with a married woman 40 years his junior. In the throes of despair, he penned more than 700 love letters and a haunting 22-part song cycle, about a village boy who falls in love with a Romany girl. Van Hove’s contemporary reimagining of Janáček’s Diary of One Who Disappeared paints a deeply affecting portrait of identity, infatuation, and ultimately, alienation. Read more »
If aging French modernist composer Darius Milhaud took a risk in adapting La Mère Coupable as an opera, it wasn’t the quirky, atonal style he used for his score. Read more »
>The Crypt Sessions, in collaboration with On Site Opera, presented the world premiere of Gregg Kallor’s The Tell-Tale Heart
An extraordinarily rich variety of opera happens locally, under the umbrella of New York Opera Fest.
Poor Paisiello. Out of the nearly 100 operas written by this industrious composer just one was generally regarded as a masterpiece.
Cher Public