In the Academy of Vocal Arts’s (AVA) clever pairing of two Puccini works, there was every reason to expect the fix was in.
Too bad, then, that this season’s tossed flower was a bit of a wilted one.
The whole performance reminded me of what Butterfly as I have never known it, but often herad about it, can be.
BAM brings us a political opera featuring… literal balancing acts.
Logistically, a large-scale revival of the operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer is an unreasonable request, much less an expectation.
Jonas Kaufmann‘s Herbstreise to Little Old New York dominated the busy pages of October’s parterre box, boosting our total number of pageviews to nearly 400,000.
The Hungarian State Opera and Hungarian National Ballet opened their visit to Lincoln Center Tuesday night with the US stage premiere of their “national opera” Bánk Bán.
Niccolò Jommelli, forgotten now, was quite well known in Italy and southern Germany in his day.
Like most directors of this opera this century, David Alden is keen to outline the helplessness of women in the face of 19th century patriarchy.
Rufus Wainwright is determined to offer a spectacle and that intention overrides all other considerations.
The New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players (NYGASP to its friends) is giving Sullivan’s most operatic score a dusting off (or should one say dusting-up?) at the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College.
I was floored to find that Company with a female protagonist, at least in Marianne Elliott’s West End production, is a better and more complete show than original recipe Company.
Sondra Radvanovsky changed my opinion of her through a single performance—I’ll never think of her the same way again; the power of her singing overwhelmed my previous impressions.
With Liber scriptus came the biggest discovery for me, the vocal talent of Elena Stikhina.
Uneven operas, like Verdi’s Ernani, which just recently finished its Scala run, more often work as theatre on the micro level than the macro.
Earlier this month I got the opportunity to sample two very different Baltic operas.
With a program of Schumann, Wagner, Ravel and de Falla, mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca and pianist Kevin Murphy delivered a underdone performance at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday night.
Isn’t it nice to know a lot? And a little bit not.
I really cannot exaggerate the extent to which I truly did not know what was going on in New York City Opera’s production of Maria de Buenos Aires.
Those readers who know my musical tastes will not be shocked to find that I have a somewhat conflicted view of Mozart’s operatic works.
It’s high time we see Funny Girl through a different lens.
I hardly know where to heap my praise first.
The Met is on it with something something woker than woke: a noirish psychodrama of a frigid hysteric who seeks redemption via Freudian analysis!
Lyric Opera of Chicago resumed its season on Wednesday evening with the new-to-Chicago production of Puccini’s perennial audience pleaser La bohème.
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.
