In the more than 500 years of the history of operas, rarely (if ever) has a coming of age story, particularly one from the child’s point of view, been presented as the main topic of the opera.
Britten’s penultimate opera, the anti-war ghost story Owen Wingrave, was composed for television performance in 1971.
In our current political climate with issues of immigration, tribalism, and white nationalists, the 1957 musical West Side Story has a distinctly contemporary feel.
As you can imagine, oaths are sworn, curses are flung with avidity, and a mysterious shepherd sings a tune of foreboding from a distant mountain gorge just when you’d expect it.
Cycle II represented an embarrassment of musical riches.
Two atmospheric but bleak works provide a musical illustration of the notion that misery loves company.
The story shows what may happen when corrupt individuals occupy positions of trust.
Mozart appears to find promiscuity a source of humor rather than something that is a fundamental problem.
It was quite a pleasure—a privilege, really—to see John Dexter’s legendary production of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites.
At the Metropolitan Opera’s Götterdämmerung on Saturday afternoon, the fires which consumed the Gods burned lukewarm.
In the most hectic and sometimes marvelous year of theater I’ve had in memory, Lady in the Dark at MasterVoices this weekend thrilled me most.
It’s a wonderful idea to cast Bohème with young singers, and these delivered astonishingly assured, confident, mature performances.
All about the life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, but depicted as an opera performed as a dress rehearsal for an opera.
Friday night’s Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera revealed once again a predictable dissonance between the performances on stage and Michael Mayer’s production.
Oh, that slippery Don Giovanni—so elusive, so chaotic, so open to no end of interpretation!
Claus Guth, in a staging of Handel’s Orlando for Theater an der Wien, decided to revisit a PTSD theme.
Odyssey Opera’s Ägyptische Helena was a beautifully executed production of a flawed opera.
The sexiest moment on Broadway this season features a 73-year-old man and a single button.
Legrenzi married the quirky libretto to a score of transcendental beauty.
Stefan Vinke’s Siegfried was not so much brawny and terrestrial, but heady and mercurial
Sunday’s “Rising Stars in Concert”, featuring the Ryan Opera Center ensemble and members of the Lyric Opera Orchestra, was a stirring and entertainingly musical afternoon.
Zelmira, a work of 1822, was the last of the eight operas Rossini composed for the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, then the largest opera house in Italy—perhaps in Europe.
Ivo van Hove really seems to be everywhere lately.
Michael Mayer‘s production of La traviata at the Met is so timid, so devoid of insight, so cynically pandering and gaudy that I hardly feel like it even matters what I think of the performances of the current cast.
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
