Kevin Ng sits down with PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novelist and critic Garth Greenwell to talk about sex, queerness, and the “promise of opera.”
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.
Nigel Wilkinson reviews Kris Defoort‘s kaleidoscopic, unsettling new opera in Brussels.
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.
Last weekend marked the opening night for West Edge Opera: Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.
This week’s “Trove Thursday” offers Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice featuring Anthony Rolfe Johnson.
Anna Netrebko‘s Manon was deeply unforgettable for its wide scope, control, and incredible virtuosity.
Missy Mazzoli, a 36-year-old composer from Brooklyn, has created the most startling and moving new American opera in memory.
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.
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.
Ambiguity. That’s the theme of the operas of Benjamin Britten (ennobled as Baron Britten of Aldeburgh).
In any narrative, the unmentioned—the unmentionable—will always be more alarming than that which is carefully described.
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.
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…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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