Saturday night I navigated the Music Center concourse, or what’s left of it with it’s seemingly eternal construction to the main plaza, wending my way to the Dorothy Chandler for the opening night of LA Opera’s Hansel and Gretel.
Christopher Maltman created a fun, coherent, often whimsical journey exploring the animal kingdom through a selection of animal songs.
The Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho is surely the reason that Covent Garden has made a commercial release of this “Live to Cinemas” relay from March of 2017.
“The heavens are telling” begins the famous chorus that ends the first section of The Creation.
An image of the old, ruined Coventry Cathedral goes into closer and closer focus until the stage is dominated by a grassy stone.
Curtis Opera ventured Sweeney Todd.
This was not a performance as gimmick.
This program honored the singer, composer and theorist Giulio Caccini, “Giulio da Romano,” on the 400th anniversary of his death.
Lohengrin descended upon the Wiener Staatsoper this month like American college students to Oktoberfest: loudly, spastically, not especially coherent, and in full lederhosen and dirndls.
“Her showboating performance on October 29, while certainly not lacking in spectacular moments, came as a sad disappointment after her ‘gripping and insightful’ Norma last season.”
There are shows with iconic characters, and there are shows with iconic characters playing iconic characters.
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.
Tell us: What’s your favorite Verdi performance?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
×
Sign up for Parterre’s free newsletter.
Exclusive opera reviews, commentary, and top reads
delivered to your email weekly…ish.