Anna Netrebko and Latonia Moore (pictured) rekindle “The Grand Opera Buzz.”
“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’s muse Dorothy Bishop returns to New York’s plush Metropolitan Room tomorrow night with another edition of her “Dozen Divas” revue.
Fellow parterrians, my review in the Observer of this year’s PROTOTYPE festival does not appear until Wednesday.
Our Own JJ confesses he just doted on Heartbreak Express, but “You Us We All was not my cup of twee.”
“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.”
“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.
Our Own JJ reviews Orlando and Early Shaker Spirituals in the Observer.
Our Own JJ was only semi-amused.
Our own publisher and New York Observer scribe Julie Jordan James Jorden plays pundit again for WQXR’s “Conducting Business.”
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.”
I expected something lovely, but what I beheld was nothing short of magnificent.
It’s particularly bewildering that before 2013 there was no such thing as the Prototype Festival.
>”Ghastly!” — New York Observer
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.
