This Sunday marked a muted return of the Richard Tucker Foundation Gala, which had the dubious distinction of the fourth edition not to feature a prizewinner and perhaps the first not to provide complete orchestral and choral accompaniment for its performers.
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Chopping up the action and dutifully showing each plot point may work in a film but in an opera, where every piece of marginal dialogue must be set to music, it feels like a chore.
In this vulgar world, there is no situation that can’t be limned with a power ballad.
For Philadelphia opera lovers, October means the Giargiari Bel Canto Competition—a staple event for the Academy of Vocal Arts, and a pipeline for the public to discover some of their strongest resident artists.
In Handel’s Rodelinda, a usurped monarch, believed dead, returns to avenge his deposition and reclaim the woman he loves.
I hate to say I nearly cringe at the thought of Gioachino Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia.
On October 20th, a wet but warmish Friday night, the Metropolitan Opera opened this season’s revival of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera in David Alden’s 2012 production.
You might wonder how this slimly plotted show, which had a brief Off-Broadway run in 2007 before fading into relative obscurity, ended up occupying a piece of prime Main Stem real estate nearly two decades later. To that end, I have four words: Josh Gad. Andrew Rannells.
All in all, this was truly a superb achievement for San Francisco Opera and an auspicious first chapter in the Wagner opera journey with Eun Sun Kim.
Suddenly, here it was, and I wondered if it was a dream or an illusion.
The Hunt’s strongest argument for the possibility of growth, connection, and agency even under adverse and restrictive circumstances lay, of course, in its music, in which three individual voices were able to combine and transform into something infinitely rich and strange.
Wanna feel old? Hair, “The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical,” as it styled itself, has its 56th birthday this month.
It’s a warning that could strike fear in even the heartiest theatergoer.
How appropriate that the Met should present this supposedly “Jewish” opera after many in the audience had just spent twelve days immersed in the genuine article over the High Holy Days.
Instead of following the story, we in the audience spend most of the evening thinking “What?? Why is that happening?”
One got a sense that the Met and the maestro directed most of the rehearsal and preparation toward the opening night premiere of the Heggie opus
Bay Area composer Mason Bates’s and librettist Mark Campbell’s contemporary opera about the life of the tech mogul Steve Jobs came home “to the place where it all began” in spectacular fashion
Rather than focusing on a narrative, Unholy Wars explores a series of timeless yet current themes: war, destruction, alienation, and what it means to be perceived as outsider—particularly from the Middle East—in the context of a violent world.
German opera-director Claus Guth has reimagined Schwanengesang as a series of scarred soldier’s visions in Doppelgänger, showing this week in at the Park Avenue Armory.
In sum: not a perfect Simon Boccanegra—is there such a thing?—but a grand and often great one.
David Devan may be leaving the company, but there can be no better living tribute to him than this extraordinary work, which in 90 minutes gives us everything we could want from a new opera
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