It was an unexpected tone for the cold stone and moody ambiance of the catacombs—an odd juxtaposition that I’m not sure really worked.
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It was as though they had released us from an enchantment and we all woke up giggling and surprisingly well rested.
By Annie Levin
Overall, this was a superb achievement and a thrilling season opener for the San Francisco Opera.
But pressing questions remains: Why? Who is this Figaro for?
Unlike more surface-level historically informed practice which has become the norm in early music ensembles, this project stands out in its surprisingly deep engagements with the ethical and practical challenges posed by “recreating” Wagner’s sound.
Two experimental new works from thingNY explore decadence, quarantine, digestion, and lineage at The Exponential Festival.
By Annie Levin
Only by knowing what went on around the great composers is it possible to truly understand why they are great and why their operas have come down to us (and why dozens of other titles have been left behind).
When the subject of New York City Opera comes up, you always hear the same query: “What happened to City Opera? Are they even performing these days??”
By Eli Jacobson
Dmitri Tcherniakov’s interpretation of Wagner’s Der Fliegende Höllander presents an engrossing character study about Senta and the Dutchman’s struggles against their insular community’s stifling conformism.
Love makes fools of us all – that seems to be the theme of this summer’s Glimmerglass Festival.
By Eli Jacobson
Don’t cry for me, Birgit Nilsson
By Patrick Mack
You probably won’t leave Idomeneo ready to burst out in song, but what the opera lacks in melodic immediacy it makes up for in sheer virtuosity.
Jay Scheib’s Augmented-Reality Parsifal is a cautionary reminder that technological innovation shouldn’t absolve directors from the exacting work of deriving intelligent and fascinating theater from the source material.
In Nike Wagner’s essay “The Sounding Silence,” the German dramaturge argues that “the longing for deathrepresents the central motif” of her great-grandfather’s opera Tristan und Isolde.
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.
When my editor suggested to me a round-up of my favorite recordings of Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann I was très, très, intrigued.
By Patrick Mack
Can György Ligeti‘s only opera be understood as the composer’s own grappling with trauma, death, and memory of a past life?
Folks who have never attended a full-length, uncut Giacomo Meyerbeer grand opera have been known to pout and ponder: Why did the most popular opera composer of the mid-nineteenth century all but vanish from the stages of the world after a hundred years?
By John Yohalem
As a burgeoning opera fan, I relied on YouTube to connect me with the art form.
By Emma Hoffman
Too young to be in love. But not too young to go to war or to die.
By Eli Jacobson
Pelléas and Mélisande are not transparent to themselves. Which means: they each have an unconscious.
I suspect Carolina Uccelli was tough.
By John Yohalem
This July, Munich played host to hordes of football fans in town for the European Championship—and arguably the two finest working sopranos today.
By Emma Hoffman
The rule that governs Dante’s Inferno is called the “contrapasso” – that every sinner is given a punishment in poetic proportion to their crime.
By Harry Rose
