The eventually reopened Metropolitan Opera promises a swift return to its status quo ante as a farm team for the English National Opera, sharing the London company’s new Ring cycle directed by vieillard terrible Richard Jones.
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.
As previewed earlier this week, Los Angeles Opera presents a Ring marathon this weekend.
Cycle II represented an embarrassment of musical riches.
At the Metropolitan Opera’s Götterdämmerung on Saturday afternoon, the fires which consumed the Gods burned lukewarm.
When Anthony Tommasini finds more political content in the Ring than your stage director does, you’re doing it wrong.
Wagner’s Ring is an artistic masterpiece that is peerless in its ability to continually reveal layers of musical, theatrical, and philosophical insight
As Brünnhilde invokes the gods of an empty Valhalla for one last time and strides confidently into a wall of flame, we pause for a moment, unsure of what will follow.
Siegfried is, in a sense, The Ring’s odd one out.
If Das Rheingold is an opera about infinitude, the illusory idea that the world is large enough to satisfy all of our desires, passions, and lusts, Die Walküre is an opera about scarcity.
Casting the Ring as a parable for the state of the current world, seen through the eyes of a progressive urban opera lover (and not an early German nationalist), offers us soothing self-justification.
La Cieca’s familiar spirits have been turning their generally steely eyes to the Future Met Wiki, attempting in vain to make sense of impending repertoire and casting at Casa Gelb.
Revealed: first images of Frank Castorf‘s production of the Ring, launching Friday at Bayreuth.
The complete recording of Der Ring des Nibelungen conducted by Christian Thielemann at the Bayreuth Festival is now on sale
for only $5.99. And, no, I am not making this up.
Our JJ’s recent reminiscences over at WQXR about the whopping cost of a Ring recording back in the Mad Men era seemed all the more startling to La Cieca when she took a gander at a “new” live Ring offered by our friends at Opera Depot.
Peter Gelb says the Ring will definitely not return, as originally planned, in 2017, and where has La Cieca heard that before?
And finally, we come to the last night of our Ring-watching experience, cher public.
Ring mania continues tonight at 9 pm with Siegfried on PBS.
Welcome, cher public, to the second night of the week’s Wagnerama.
Welcome, cher public, to the first night of our Ring-watching experience
This is Ring week here at parterre.com, cher public.
The Met’s controversial Ring cycle, directed by Robert Lepage (not pictured) and conducted by TBA (possibly pictured) makes its home video debut on September 11.
For whatever reason (Lack of James Levine? Incompetence of Robert LePage? The economy? Wagner overload?), next season’s Ring cycle at the Met doesn’t seem to be selling.
The Robert Lepage production of the Ring cycle will be shown complete (including the now de rigueur fifth part of the pentalogy, Wagner’s Dream) September 11-14 on PBS
You can call Robert Lepage many things (and the critics have!), but one thing you cannot call him is “inflexible.”
