It’s autumn in New York, baby.
Wanna feel old? Hair, “The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical,” as it styled itself, has its 56th birthday this month.
I love it, truly, just not that much.
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
“None of that sentimental crap, okay?”
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
Phil Chan described his point of departure for reimagining Orientalist works as the question, “what else could this be?”
Power struggles, prejudice, feuds and revenge abound in San Francisco at the moment.
The great archetypal image of an opera singer is a towering Wagnerian soprano who shatters entire panes of glass the moment she opens her mouth.
When our friends at Naxos and C Major announced near-dueling releases of Puccini’s “shabby little shocker,” I was ready with my critic’s pen dipped in bile.
At the northern tip of Seneca, longest and deepest of New York State’s Finger Lakes, sits the pretty little town of Geneva.
In the case of this summer’s resuscitation project at the Bard Summerscape Festival, Camille Saint-Saëns’ Henri VIII , it was quite evident that this is a dramatically sound work with consistently well-crafted, theatrically vital and attractive music that provides at least three roles for gifted singing actors.
Teatro Nuovo took a spirited journey of rediscovery into the valley of forgotten operas and resurrected Federico and Luigi Ricci’s 1850 opera buffa Crispino e la Comare last Thursday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center.
It was thrilling to see and hear Will Crutchfield’s insights come to life onstage in performance when Teatro Nuovo performed Poliuto at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center Wednesday July 19.
If sex sells, then the 40 years of success for Evita show that the strawman construction and vicious takedown of an unsexy, supremely unlikable woman in just under two-and-a-half hours is just as viable a quantity.
June is long gone. It was truly a month of excellence and exuberance here in San Francisco, coupled with cozy and inviting weather, as if to make up for the extended winter.
It’s been eight decades since darling Aix-en-Provence was under attack—its last formal invasion, at least by non-operagoers, was in 1942 during the German occupation of southern France. But on Friday, the town was besieged once again by its annual festival, with two dazzling premieres that examined the cruel and constructive dimensions of war and revolution.
Tell us: What’s your favorite Verdi performance?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
