Servant leadership
Christina Colanduoni on Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Le Nozze di Figaro
Review
All the light we cannot hear
The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s program of works by Mozart and Kevin Puts, a composer championed by star Renée Fleming, was one of musical and artistic contrasts.
And suddenly that name will never be the same
Christopher Corwin reviews Pablo Larraín‘s Maria
Hello to Berlin
Montagu James reviews the US tour of the Kirill Petrenko-led Berlin Philharmonic
Sisters are doing it for themselves
War! Heroism! Mysterious strangers! Attempted suicide! Steadfast love! Così fan tutte, as staged November 18-21 at Juilliard Opera, had… none of these things.
It takes a woman
The plight of two women, each from different backgrounds, was on full display in San Francisco opera houses last week.
An afternoon at the opera
Il trovatore may be famous for its melodramatic plot and unlikely mistaken identities, but surely even Verdi and Cammarano couldn’t have imagined the chaos of a performance featuring two Manricos and two Leonoras.
Thane enthusiasm
Washington National Opera’s second full-run offering of the season, a new production of Verdi’s perennially appealing Macbeth, premiered last Wednesday at the Kennedy Center.
A Christmas story
This archly traditional production of La bohème was a little shaky on opening night. It nevertheless had a full complement of sterling individual performances to take us on home.
Character assassination
Austin Opera’s 2024 production of The Manchurian Candidate proved to be a daring and timely commentary on political power in America, shortly after the 2024 election, just as it had been before the 2016 election.
On an evening in Roma
After an uneven gala performance of Tosca on Tuesday, I’m not sure what the Met means by “celebrating Puccini.”
Aïda, harder not smarter
With Boston Lyric Opera’s largest opera production of the season already well behind us, the one-off semi-staged gala performance of Aïda held on Sunday at Emerson College’s Colonial Theatre to support the company’s vast education and community engagement apparatus, was a particularly enticing entry on the Boston cultural calendar.
Mixte blessings
I was just moderately excited when LA Opera announced that French tenor Benjamin Bernheim would be coming to concertize at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, 90210.
Persson of interest
The New York Philharmonic podium has been occupied the past two weeks by Finnish conductors once thought to be top contenders for the ensemble’s music directorship.
Rise and look around you
My first opera of the new season in Paris, after kicking off in Brussels with Kris Defoort’s thought-provoking The Day of our Singing, was another nearly-new work, totally new to me: Sir George Benjamin’s Picture a day like this.
The new Norma
In a splashy new recording of Norma, Marina Rebeka “is doing something very untoward, and it appears destructive to her voice.” It has Niel Rishoi worried.
My Verona
It surprises even me how some operas have eluded me in live performance even after lo, these many years. One of them is Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette.
Next to godliness
Washington National Opera rounded out its season opening weekend with a one-night-only performance entitled “Gods & Mortals: A Celebration of Wagner” the evening after the premiere of its new production of Fidelio.
Actress of protest
Ainadamar functions on two levels: as a defiant dance against fascist totalitarianism and as an exaltation of the diva.
The cheese stands alone
Strike Up the Band! cried the brothers Gershwin (and book-writers George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind) in the first of their three satirical, vaguely political operettas—sort of jazz Gilbert & Sullivan—that they dreamed up in the late 1920s.
Tenue farfalla
A revival of Huang Ruo’s M. Butterfly, a co-production between the Barbican and BBC Symphony Orchestra, landed in London last week.
Neither fish nor fowl
Nigel Wilkinson reviews Kris Defoort‘s kaleidoscopic, unsettling new opera in Brussels.
Tucker and roll
The Richard Tucker Foundation Gala has always been a big annual celebration of the voice with an emphasis on big-voiced singers in big repertoire (not much Wagner usually, though…). Like so many reliable operatic institutions it has struggled for survival after the pandemic.
The chimes of midnight
Aside from a tour with the LSO this spring, this was, I believe, the only time Antonio Pappano would be conducting in the US this season. This made the concert at Symphony Hall a real treat.
I’ll take the fall
The days are getting shorter, but you can keep the prattle going this fall’s Talk of the Town! You will, you can, you must join in the discussion about: Great mezzo soprano performances (October),
Gained in translation (November), Teleport me back to… (December).