What belongs to us
Kevin Ng sits down with PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novelist and critic Garth Greenwell to talk about sex, queerness, and the “promise of opera.”
Death in Venice
14 pieces since 2007.
14
pieces
20
years
The best way to spread Christmas cheer
Back to Brussels last Sunday for my third new opera of the season (after The Time of our Singing, also at La Monnaie, and Picture a day like this, at the Opéra Comique): Mikael Karlsson’s Fanny and Alexander, with a libretto by Royce Vavrek.
Neither fish nor fowl
Nigel Wilkinson reviews Kris Defoort‘s kaleidoscopic, unsettling new opera in Brussels.
Illness as illness
In operatic pathology, diseases are endowed with preposterous mythological properties: they are both an emblem of desire and the punishment for desire. They are crime, confessional, and executioner all rolled into one.
Dazed and confused
Last weekend marked the opening night for West Edge Opera: Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.
Drunk in both head and heart
This week’s “Trove Thursday” offers Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice featuring Anthony Rolfe Johnson.
Gone girl
Anna Netrebko‘s Manon was deeply unforgettable for its wide scope, control, and incredible virtuosity.
New waves
Missy Mazzoli, a 36-year-old composer from Brooklyn, has created the most startling and moving new American opera in memory.
The good, the bad and the Haydn
In a striking program at Carnegie Hall last night, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s), with guest vocalist Susan Graham, brought together a wide array of musical proclivities—good and good bad taste alike.
Fatal attraction
Benjamin Britten’s final opera Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella, is given a lush and quite beautiful production from stage director Deborah Warner for the English National Opera.
Britten on the wind
Ambiguity. That’s the theme of the operas of Benjamin Britten (ennobled as Baron Britten of Aldeburgh).
Bly spirit
In any narrative, the unmentioned—the unmentionable—will always be more alarming than that which is carefully described.
Unexpected ghost
Frustrated, perhaps, by the bulky requirements and dubious future of grand opera—and grand opera commissions—Benjamin Britten created some of his most intriguing and, nowadays, popular pieces for small casts and chamber orchestra.
Dark year for NYCO?
UPDATE: La Cieca has just heard that the “dark season” is not a done deal just yet. The NYCO board meets next week to make that decision. (Given how late in the game this is, most likely the “decision” will be no more than a formality. But La Cieca will keep her ear to the […]
I’ll take the fall
The days are getting shorter, but you can keep the prattle going this fall’s Talk of the Town! You will, you can, you must join in the discussion about: Great mezzo soprano performances (October),
Gained in translation (November), Teleport me back to… (December).