Though barely a week old, 2019 has already provided New Yorkers with an essential, breathtaking music drama focusing on two women struggling for their very survival.
Alban Berg’s compact yet potent oeuvre has long played an outsized role in shaping my understanding of music’s aesthetic evolution.
Use bodily force and get your friends to one of the next five performances of the Met’s new production of Adriana Lecouvreur. It is everything!
Russian repertoire figures very centrally in AVA’s mission.
Heretofore I’d avoided the Met’s abridged, English-language holiday presentations.
Philadelphia is a city famous for its musical institutions—so, of course, at this time of year Messiah performances abound.
French early music group Ensemble Correspondances offered two of the year’s very best concerts.
At Friday’s opening of Otello, there was a good deal of interesting going on, though not all of it necessarily onstage.
“Non mi dispiace” seemed to be the general consensus in the loggione December 7 when Verdi’s Attila came roaring into La Scala to open the 2018-19 season.
The long evening didn’t achieve the degree of celebration it should have.
Here’s a quick sprint through some recent (and a few maybe not-so-very-recent) Handel CDs that have been stacking up.
Four fine Handel-centric concerts from the Morgan Library to Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center proved a bracing antidote to pervasive Messiah-mania.
This a sincere revival with a social conscience, a chance to take immersive part in the Christmas miracle, not just watch it remotely.
At the opening of the Scottish Opera’s 2017 production of Turnage’s opera Greek, I was very sorry I’d missed Anna Nicole.
Jules Massenet’s version of the Cinderella fairy tale, Cendrillon, seems to be back in vogue after many years of obscurity.
Ars Minerva upped their game by mounting an 18th century baroque opera, Giovanni Porta’s 1738 Ifigenia in Aulide.
Diana Damrau‘s performance as Violetta was the work of a very ordinary artist, one susceptible to vocal flubs, poor intonation, and an all too banal approach operatic performance.
Anna Netrebko sang throughout with a palpable sense of joy and ease in vocal production, never a hint of strain or any moment forced.
There comes a time where everything falls into place, and more importantly, when your head and heart are also in the right mindset. That’s when when the opera becomes cathartic, life-changing experience.
The New Camerata Opera performs a double bill of John Blow’s Venus and Adonis, sometimes dubbed the first English opera, and Gustav Holst’s Savitri.
The proceedings took the virtue of longevity too much to heart; the night stretched on interminably.
Give the creators credit for producing an emotional response.
Only the Sound Remains introduced Americans to the latest collaboration between dazzling Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and hirsute metteur-en-scène Peter Sellars.
French conductor Emmanuelle Haïm debuted with the Philadelphia Orchestra this weekend, leading performances of Handel and Purcell.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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