Opera San José‘s La Traviata has all the buzz and energy of a world premiere.
Music for New Bodies at Lincoln Center’s Running AMOC* Festival proves Matthew Aucoin really is everything he’s made out to be
An impressive cast blurs binaries as John Adams‘s ambitious Antony and Cleopatra arrives at the Met
New York shall never be in need of another Messiah to assist to during the holiday season, but a new tradition is beginning to crystallize at the cavernous St. John the Divine to rival it.
On June 16, San Francisco Opera concluded their excellent Centennial Season with a heartfelt 100th Anniversary Concert, featuring a starry cast, three conductors (including current and former Music Directors) and the SF Opera Orchestra and Chorus.
Antony and Cleopatra was an auspicious start to San Francisco Opera’s second century, a performance that seems to improve as I continue to think about it.
Curtis Opera Theater mounted a musically remarkable account of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic on March 2.
When John Adams’ A Flowering Tree had its world premiere in Vienna in 2006, critical reaction from the Austrian and German press was mixed-to-negative.
It was a night a-tingle with excitement at the Metropolitan Opera House.
The experience of watching Wagner’s final opera Parsifal is frequently elevated to a spiritual occurrence, and productions have historically emphasized the religious dimension of the opera’s core themes of redemption and the dangers of temptation.
It is, as Noel Coward remarked, astonishing how potent cheap music is. According to Brockway and Weinstock’s World of Opera, Gounod’s Faust was performed, after a rather lackluster debut in 1859, a thousand times inParis at the Opera between 1869 and 1894—a gobsmacking average of once every nine days.
Entrepreneur, philanthropist, humanitarian and Democrat Agnes Varis died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. Besides her advocacy of prescription-drug reform and financial support of the Jazz Foundation of America, she was a managing director of the Metropolitan Opera, where her projects included the Agnes Varis and Karl Leichtman Rush Tickets Program and the underwriting…
Look, this is a very special piece of music for me. You were twenty once, right? You were self-righteous. You had your musical heroes, and your mind was being remolded every fifteen minutes or so by a rapid succession of new experiences that challenged your notions of what music could do.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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