Director R.B. Schlather deftly walks a porous boundary, casting this primordial paroxysm of Germanness as a dialogue between its naïve and moralistic narrative with its outsized legacy.
By Harry Rose
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The second act of Dream of the Red Chamber reached the apex and provided the audience with soul-stirring fulfillment.
Your favorite box set-aholic here completely missed the release last August of Giuseppe Di Stefano – Complete Decca Recordings in honor of the great tenor’s centenary.
By Patrick Mack
To conclude its triumphant season, last week the Met Orchestra performed its annual Carnegie Hall concerts under music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin and once again performed superbly.
The winners of the evening were the composer Riccardo Zandonai and Teatro Grattacielo which pulled off a near-impossible feat with success.
By Eli Jacobson
An elegantly streamlined production of Into the Woods now on stage at Philadelphia’s Arden Theatre makes the best case for the show I’ve yet seen
By David Fox
Do you know the musical about the quirky little girl, her dysfunctional family and the devastating secret that binds them all together?
“This used to be a funhouse… but now it’s full of evil clowns / It’s time to start the countdown…. I’m gonna burn it down”
The elusive La dame blanche returned for one evening to New York City on May 28 thanks to the New Amsterdam Opera led by maestro Keith Chambers.
By Eli Jacobson
The opera The Rake’s Progress, as many people know already, was inspired by a series of engravings and paintings of the same name by William Hogarth, showing the decline of a young man into depravity and insanity.
Can we start by not using Barbra Streisand as a polestar here?
Pavarotti and Freni are gone but the Franco Zeffirelli Bohème remains.
By Eli Jacobson
The monsoon outside was no match for the torrents of gorgeous, dramatic singing and playing that was unleashed inside George Washington University’s Lisner Hall Sunday afternoon when Washington Concert Opera, in a glorious deluge of Léo Delibes, presented Lakmé to round out its return season.
By Harry Rose
Before Wednesday I don’t remember gasping when I entered a concert venue.
We open in a war room that resembled nothing so much as a parking garage. Amneris’s boudoir was certainly recognizable as such but I’d be hard-pressed to pinpoint the location of the Triumphal Scene other than the inside of a large discothèque.
By Patrick Mack
The Met brought back 2019 smash Akhnaten last night, with nearly the exact same cast and creative team, and with nearly the same knockout effect of three years ago.
It was Matthew Jocelyn’s libretto, with its disorientingly deconstructive approach to its source text, that gave Brett Dean’s Hamlet its identity.
It’s maybe not a surprise that Carmen is neither a good vocal nor temperamental fit for Isabel Leonard.
By Harry Rose
It’s nice to see Sony Classical backing a serious operatic soprano and not some crossover refugee from Britain’s Got Talent or another syrupy Christmas album from the world’s reigning Heldentenor.
By Patrick Mack
I wonder why many New Yorkers have been led to believe that the only Handel conductor in the world is Harry Bicket.
Sondra Radvanovsky is very special here!
By Niel Rishoi
The Met’s revival of Turandot on Saturday night was surprisingly contentious.
“We came through the Depression by the skin of our teeth! One more tight squeeze like that and where will we be?”
By David Fox
