Self-flagellation Self-flagellation

One moral is that Eugene O’Neill may just not be opera fodder.

My dinner with Aeschylus My dinner with Aeschylus

Having had many memorable encounters with these characters before, I had been looking forward to encountering them again in an ambitious contemporary Oresteia, but I left the Armory feeling that writer-director Robert Icke just didn’t get it.

Bored to death Bored to death

Trove Thursday offers Shostakovich’s 1962 Katerina Izmailova with Australian soprano Marie Collier as its anti-heroine and Jon Vickers as her lover.

From Lear to eternity From Lear to eternity

Ninety-five years ago, Evelyn Lear was born on January 8 in Brooklyn, and Trove Thursday remembers the soprano with one of her earliest successes: Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten co-starring her husband Thomas Stewart, Helmut Krebs and Franz Crass.

Velvet underwhelmed Velvet underwhelmed

“Camp” is exactly the lens through which The Velvet Touch is best examined, including an utterly bewildering cross-pollinating of genres.

Going south Going south

By the end, we have rolling heads, a lot of screaming, and cheap horror too often overwhelms the better instincts of the screenwriters.

The right box The right box

Let’s call this meeting to order. My name is Patrick and I’m a boxset-aholic.

Future imperfect Future imperfect

This year’s treat was Vittorio Gnecchi’s Cassandra, completed around 1905