Snow business
Every year I say I’m not going to another La Bohème because I’ve seen this too many times.
Review
Golden apple
Paris can be a lot to handle, but this week it was a lot to Handel.
La vie de broham
Imagine the good fortune of attending La Bohème with someone who’s never seen it!
Rolling along
Show Boat continues to communicate, even in the less than perfect circumstances of this latest revival.
Flame war
The role debut of a world-class singer is always a time of great anticipation, hopefully to be followed by celebration, if not unbridled jubilation.
No place like Rome
“There it is! The Castel Sant’ Angelo!”
Katerina’s insomnia
Throw in a trio of murders and a healthy splash of vodka and you have, more or less, the plot of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
Angelina’s ashes
Kitsch is alive and well in Rossini’s La Cenerentola at the War Memorial.
Fox and friends
Cecilia Bartoli, the revered, ebullient, and unique mezzo-soprano, does not like to fly in airplanes. Yet she managed to journey to St. Petersburg, Russia.
Levee duty
If you are of the belief that Show Boat can stand on its own as a classic score and thus doesn’t need the trappings of musical production, you’ll love the New York Philharmonic’s “semi-staged” production.
Dullsville
This was the kind of night that proves the haters right: sometimes opera is boring.
Side eye and bitch face
At the first intermission at last night’s Met revival of Aida, I turned to my companion and said, “So… what about the Aida? I thought she was supposed to be good.”
Vissi d’artist
The San Francisco Opera is batting a thousand where young singers are concerned this season.
Anger’s aweigh
It was a night a-tingle with excitement at the Metropolitan Opera House.
Unadorned
There was wonder and magic last night in Philly when The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society presented British tenor Mark Padmore and American pianist Jonathan Biss in a recital devoted to the songs of Schumann, Tippett, and Fauré.
Martinu, very dry
Gotham Chamber Opera, which began to operate twelve years ago with a double bill of Bohuslav Martinu’s quirky little pieces, opened its 2014-15 season with two more, Alexandre bis (Alexander, twice) and Comedy on the Bridge.
Myth opportunity
America hasn’t exactly been vigorous about commemorating the 250th anniversary of the death of Jean-Philippe Rameau.
Black, box
Passion propels more operas than almost any other human emotion; however, many musical dramas have a very different sort of passion—the final days of Jesus—as their subject.
Sweet prince
The rediscovery of Franco Faccio’s Amleto, a curious score that last week, via Baltimore Concert Opera, received its first performances since 1871, reminds us just how tough an act Giuseppe Verdi was to follow.
No such Gluck
When Richard Wagner reached into the past and revised Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide, he went beyond the accepted boundaries of tinkering and more or less created a new work that’s fomented aesthetic debates ever since.
By Adriel
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Stockholm syndrome
The big news out of the Bay this week, of course, is that David Gockley, after ten years at the helm here and over forty in opera, has decided not to pull a Bloomberg/Galupe-Borszkh.
Panning for gold
Giacomo Puccini’s horse-opera version of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” La Fanciulla del West, based on David Belasco’s play, The Girl of the Golden West, enjoyed the status of a curate’s egg for quite a while.
Nightingale
Readers of this site are typically up to speed on emerging vocal talents, so clearly there is no need for me to write a review of Chilean-German soprano Carolina Ullrich’s riveting recital at the Paris Opera?
Ten thousand bedrooms
The Metropolitan Opera desperately needed a new production of Le nozze di Figaro.