Ana Maria Martinez’s tremendously impressive Cio-Cio-San dominated the season premiere of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly at the Met.
Sir Richard Eyre’s new Manon Lescaut at the Met Friday night demonstrated no particular aptitude for opera.
With February 14th falling on a Sunday, there will be no Valentine’s Day Met performance this year.
A “lone voice in the wilderness” booed Barbara Frittoli’s calamitous Nedda.
Maria Agresta‘s delicately-acted, sumptuously-sung seamstress transformed what might have been just an average Wednesday night revival into something finer.
On Thursday evening Jennifer Wilson “finally” made a belated, disappointing Met debut as Turandot.
The annual Richard Tucker Gala is probably the event of the year to indulge your love of verismo staples and can belto screaming.
Angela Gheorghiu‘ s idiosyncratically alluring, sometimes maddening, always fascinating Floria Tosca inevitably became the evening’s unmissable raison d’être.
With help from the Met’s invaluable performance archive, here is a look back at just some of what you could have seen, and perhaps did see, on October 31st through the years at the Met.
If you had told me 20 years ago that at some point in the future I would have over 550 of the Metropolitan Opera’s performances, audio and video, at my command with the touch of a button I would say my eulogy had just been read and I’d been taken to my reward.
LA Opera opened their 30th season with a pairing of two of their most popular productions, both of which were initially staged by filmmakers not unfamiliar with the vagaries of our industry outpost here in Hollywoodland.
It took me years to appreciate the serious Donizetti, but I’ve always loved the composer’s comic operas, particularly Don Pasquale and Elisir.
There is a simple elegance to the single-composer recital album format. For the listener in the mood for, say, Puccini, it’s a chance to delve into his music without any pesky interruptions by those other guys like Verdi or Massenet. And if one is also in the mood for a particular singer’s art, then the…
No surprises this week: back to normal with what is perhaps the world’s most favorite opera: Puccini’s La bohème.
The Metropolitan Opera yesterday afternoon was an uncommonly cozy place, as the auditorium was packed to the rafters with friends and family members of the nine National Council Audition Finalists.
Imagine two tenors releasing French opera aria collections at the same time without duplicating a single track!
The key to enjoying Bellini’s I Capuleti e Montechi is to do a hard factory reset and reformat your brain to forget all other works based on Romeo and Juliet.
Manon Lescaut was Giacomo Puccini’s first big international success. His publisher, Giulio Ricordi, tried to put him off the project by citing Jules Massenet’s very successful adaptation just nine years previously. Puccini was intent on making the story his own, insisting, “A woman like Manon can have more than one lover… I shall feel it…
At what moment does a “rising star” become simply a “star”?
2014 was a year of lemons into lemonade.
Olga Peretyatko has officially left the chorus.
One of the major complaints about the five year casting system (as well as the shared productions by different companies) is that operatic events are rarely surprises anymore.
What would you do if I asked you to take a old, faded version of Puccini’s score for La Bohème and fill in the unreadable parts with a mélange of disco, kabarett, and Alban Berg?
Every year I say I’m not going to another La Bohème because I’ve seen this too many times.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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