De Nederlandse Opera’s remarkable 2011 feat of premiering productions of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide and Iphigénie en Tauride on the same day and virtually the same set has been issued on a 2-DVD set by Opus Arte
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Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s only opera for Rome was written to an existing libretto by the great Pietro Metastasio, L’Olimpiade, which had already been set by Vivaldi the year previously.
Bollywood dance numbers, kung fu fighting, simulated nudity — and rock-solid musical values — added up to a sterling Giulio Cesare at at the Met.
“I’ve lived with mendacity!—Why can’t you live with it? Hell, you got to live with it, there’s nothing else to live with except mendacity, is there?”
The best joke in Offenbach’s delicious Orphée aux Enfers is the opening premise: Orphée and Eurydice are miserably married, due to her utter boredom with his old-fashioned music.
“The spring season at the Met is as changeable as March weather in New York: crisp and brilliant for a day or two, and then suddenly as dismal as Thursday night’s Faust.”
Short as Roman emperor Eliogabalo’s reign was, the world sighed in relief when it was over.
On first hearing, Paul Dukas’ 1907 opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue (Ariane and Bluebeard) sounds like the love child of a three-way between Wagner, Strauss, and Debussy.
There has never been a successful vampire musical—so they say. But that’s just not true.
Thursday’s Met performance of the Verdi tearjerker featured a major find: Diana Damrau, who, in her first outing as Violetta, mesmerized with her gleaming soprano and ferocious acting.
Christoph Willibald Gluck wrote some fifty operatic works, not counting revisions and translations, and in every form extant in the two cities, Paris and Vienna, in which he made his career.
Gotham Chamber Opera stumbled so badly Friday night with Francesco Cavalli’s 1668 Eliogabalo at The Box, it was hard to know whether to feel sad or angry—or both.
It has always puzzled me—and I’m not the only one—that so few successful operas have been composed in Spanish.
Those Romans! How decadent, how corrupt, how much fun!
“I didn’t think anything could be campier than Adriana. But this is nothing but camp. Adriana at least has tunes.”
With Wednesday’s stellar staging of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, the New York Philharmonic joyously put the ‘music’ back into the Broadway musical.
When is good enough not quite good enough?
Nearly 30 years after a Handel opera last played there, Carnegie Hall presented The English Concert opening a three-year opera-oratorio project on Sunday afternoon with Radamisto.
In any narrative, the unmentioned—the unmentionable—will always be more alarming than that which is carefully described.
Say this about Oedipus: The character’s got staying power.
La Salustia was Giovanni Batista Pergolesi’s first opera, composed at the tender age of 21. In structure and storyline it’s a conventional baroque opera seria.
That’s what it must have been like in 1726 London when Handel composed Alessandro for perhaps the three most famous (and expensive) singers of the day.
Wagner is becoming an important calling card for Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theatre.
C-Major continues their full frontal attack on the Verdi catalogue with this release of I Masnadieri which, I’m thrilled to report, does not hail from the Teatro di Regio in Parma like the previous aspirants. We’ve travelled south to Naples and the Teatro di San Carlo and we’re all the better for it as the…
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.
