“Call me traditional, but I want to see a silver platter!”
An incoherent production of Ruslan and Lyudmila at the Hamburg State Opera may dispense with the fantastical, but Glinka‘s magic remains.
At the heart of Tobias Kratzer’s incisively rollicking production of Tannhäuser lies a metanarrative that maps Wagner’s early political and artistic challenges onto its hero’s philosophical struggles.
“Robert Lepage‘s direction of a crucial scene in the Ring is even worse than Otto Schenk‘s, if such a thing is possible.”
Stefan Herheim‘s intensely enjoyable “barocke Muppet-Show” take on Handel’s opera starts streaming at 1:00 PM today on OperaVision.
How is it possible that no one has ever done a production of Hänsel und Gretel with the Witch played as Fanny Cradock?
“Puccini’s operas seldom take well to abstraction, since the composer engraved every detail of what should happen into the score so specifically that there was little wiggle room left.”
“Heinrich, come on over for dinner! / We’ll be so glad to see you!”
Congratulations to dramatic coloratura soprano Klára Kolonits.
>What does a great opera production do, and what does a bad production fail to do?
The Hänsel und Gretel discussions over the holidays plunged me down a YouTube rabbit hole.
The production by Sebastian Baumgarten is the type of regietheater that’s not a rethinking or reconstruction, but just a hot mess.
La Cieca (not pictured) surrenders, cher public: she can no longer bear the burden of opposing ignorant, hysterical pearl-clutching on the internet. The clutchers have won.
“New York is great. Opera is great. They deserve each other. So what can we do to get them together? Who can show us how it’s done? We need to ask the Germans.”
Fans of the “context-free laundry list” school of opera criticism will be happy to know that “the world’s preeminent philosopher in the field of aesthetics,” Roger Scruton, has now shouldered the white man’s burden of rescuing opera from interpretation.
As is happening increasingly in opera productions today (e.g., the Rosenkavalier in Stuttgart), the action of Moses und Aron at the Komische Oper begins some minutes before the music does.
Some thoughts about the perishability of opera productions follow.
Mariusz Trelinski will direct Tristan und Isolde for Metropolitan Opera in a production that will premiere there on opening night 2016.
The role debut of a world-class singer is always a time of great anticipation, hopefully to be followed by celebration, if not unbridled jubilation.
“Anna Netrebko (Leonora) is seen during the Il Trovatore photo rehearsal on August 4, 2014 in Salzburg, Austria.”
It’s time to bring out the canard again, this time a whole row of them in fact.
Our old friend Heather Mac Donald (not pictured) is back, ostensibly to mourn the loss of ‘Petrarchan intimacy with the past’ in the study of the humanities, but, reliably enough, she can’t help taking a swipe at Regietheater while she’s at it.
How, then, to explain the perplexing performance last Friday night of Falstaff, Mr. Levine’s first new production since his return?
So we may all be on the same page as we discuss, following the jump is the video of the December 7 Traviata from La Scala.
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.
