Turandot doesn’t exist
It’s back to business as usual at the Met, for better and for worse.
Review
Lady willpower
Hie thee hither to the Lyric Opera House!
Hate-watch
I can’t imagine anyone watching this two-hour schlockfest at home and then dropping $150 for the privilege to see it again, masked and in an uncomfortable chair.
The sonic clash never resolves itself
The cabaret at Saint Ann’s Warehouse delivered frothy fun and a dollop of pathos with Anthony Roth Costanzo and Justin Vivian Bond in Only an Octave Apart.
A wig and a prayer
A snarky commentator might dub last night at the Met “Boris of the divo hair flip” but that would do a disservice to a serious, often effective performance of the challenging original version of Mussorgsky’s masterpiece.
Playing with ‘Fire’
With composer Terence Blanchard and librettist Kasi Lemmons‘ incendiary Fire Shut Up in My Bones, the Met makes long overdue history and Will Liverman ascends to superstardom.
The brew that is true
This is an exuberant, uplifting, and joyous Elisir, and, for once, it was actually laugh-out-loud funny.
Real Housewives of Verismo
New Camerata Opera is presenting its first staged and indoor program in some time, at “The Muse,” a lofty cabaret space up against a cemetery in Bushwick, and their singers sound like they’ve been champing at the bit for eighteen months and are bursting to vocalize!
Widow’s talk
Call me Mary Quite Contrary if you want, but as we finally see live performances coming back, I’m reflecting with gratitude and even some nostalgia on the way COVID quarantine forged a path for entrepreneurial performance companies to recalibrate and deliver their work through streaming platforms.
Goodbye, Nostalgia!
The program was set around themes of loss, of unfulfilled wishes, the endurance of loss, triumphant or depressed.
Uncloistered
Let’s all cast our minds back to March of 2020. Or, better, let’s not.
Letting their hair down
After the break the ladies stepped up their game so much that it elevated the night into legendary status: definitely one for the books!
Great and happy, but not quite live
This was a great and happy event, but it wasn’t so much a musical one.
Love for sail
Last weekend, On Site Opera presented What Lies Beneath, a program of maritime-themed operatic excerpts staged aboard the 19th century schooner Wavertree (now a part of the South Street Seaport Museum).
Tenors al fresco
Lawrence Brownlee and Michael Spyres are two singers at the top of their game, as this concert showed, virtually peerless in music as punishing as it is pretty.
The real king
Bay Street Theater deserves enormous credit for transforming Camelot from a clumsy historical epic into a breezy, human fairytale about leaders who cannot lead.
On the edge of my seat
The San Francisco Opera became the first US opera company to present a full-blown production indoors on its home turf this season when they ushered the US opera audience into 2021-22 Season on Saturday September 21 with a stellar performance of Giacomo Puccini’s perennial favorite Tosca.
Reorientation
Concerts at Wolf Trap, mixed bags in more ways than one, provided fleeting glimpses of the old normal as moments of frisson mingled with more familiar monotony.
The curious case of Benjamin Bernheim
Who’s been hiding tenor Benjamin Bernheim from me all this time?
Round Table discussion
Like many composers of his generation, Ernest Chausson was enthralled by Wagner and he too turned to legend for his only opera, one that would consume him for final decade of his brief life.
Charisma and chemistry
For this revival of Tosca Teatro Real has configured several casts with some of the best singers in the world: Sondra Radvanovsky, Maria Agresta, Anna Netrebko, Joseph Calleja, Michael Fabiano, Yusif Eyvazov, Jonas Kaufmann, Carlos Álvarez, Gevorg Hakobyan and Luca Salsi.
Rossini al fresco
Last night, for the first time in nearly a year and a half, opera returned to Lincoln Center.
Can we still be friends?
As soon as James Clutton, the new Opera Holland Park director, stepped on stage to welcome the audience, we all knew that we were not at the typical English summer opera festival.
Sisters are doing it for themselves
Pauline Viardot‘s Cendrillon hews closer to the Perrault original than either Rossini or Massenet’s more familiar retellings and is dainty in conception as a salon opera for her students.
Win a Free Ticket to Opening Night at the Met!
Quinn Kelsey and Lise Davidsen star in the Met's new Macbeth. We're giving away one ticket, so screw your courage to the sticking place and enter now!
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).
