Michael Thalmeier‘s Tristan und Isolde in Berlin asks, how much minimalism is too much minimalism?
In his new production that opens at San Francisco Opera this weekend, Matthew Ozawa is creating a Parsifal for the cancel culture age.
As a frequent visitor of Parterre’s Jones Home (ah, the early internet!), I’d be remiss not to share this favorite clip of two queens maximizing their joint slay.
The Santa Fe Opera’s fine first Die Walküre finds Wagner in America at a crossroads.
I’d never heard Götterdämmerung in a live performance until 1985 at The Dallas Opera. OMG, so long ago!
It took me a while to “warm up” to Wagner.
Dame Gwyneth Jones as Brünnhilde pretty much started it all for me.
Tobias Kratzer‘s Das Rheingold in Munich kicks off a Ring for the post-secular age
Valentin Schwarz‘s and Simone Young‘s Ring, in its final outing at Bayreuth, is dramaturgically messy and musically excellent.
This summer’s festival, taking place amid record high temperatures and in the wake of its artistic director, Pierre Audi, featured a disquietingly zeigeisty focus on sexual violence.
The final installment of the 2025 Ring from Bayreuth
A slightly delayed broadcast of the second installment of this year’s Ring from Bayreuth
A live broadcast of the first installment of this summer’s Ring from Bayreuth
The Comet/Poppea at this summer’s Running AMOC* festival at Lincoln Center is a thrilling, startling, deeply moving experience
Kent Nagano‘s and the Richard-Wagner-Akademie‘s historically informed Ring Cycle takes on Siegfried in Dresden
Carmen in Brussels is dramatically vibrant, if vocally stretched
Antonio Pappano leads a performance recorded in London last month
Asmik Grigorian’s scorching turn in Il trittico in Paris has Nigel Wilkinson wondering, ‘what is it that makes Americans so weepy?’
Impossible to pick any one film clip, but it’s hard to imagine a more evocative use of operatic music than Lars von Trier‘s Melancholia.
Hunding, of Die Walküre notoriety, is the most misunderstood character in opera.
Matthew Travisano takes on Mimì’s Act III aria from La bohème — not that one, the other one — in the latest installment of the “Perspectives on an Aria” series
Back to Rameau again this week with Samson at the Opéra Comique, my third Rameau production in as little as three months, after Les Fêtes d’Hébé in the same house, and Castor et Pollux at the Palais Garnier.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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