A joint Beethoven–Adams program conducted by Dima Slobodeniouk suggests a way forward for the embattled Boston Symphony Orchestra.
With Nixon, Klinghoffer, and Andris Nelsons on the mind, Parterre Box offers a recording of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s recent John Adams outing.
The embattled Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra bring Adams and Dvorák to Carnegie Hall.
Kent Nagano gives a boost to the Opéra national de Paris‘s revival of Nixon in China.
A high-drama Vanessa by the Boston Symphony Orchestra offers something to believe in.
An impressive cast blurs binaries as John Adams‘s ambitious Antony and Cleopatra arrives at the Met
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.
Double double, toil and trouble, y’all, and happy spooky season from Slaylem. (It’s like Salem, but fun.)
Washington National Opera’s final production of the season, seen May 22, is also its high point: a new Turandot directed by Francesca Zambello, updated to the 20th century and featuring the world premiere of a completion of Puccini’s score by composer Christopher Tin and playwright and screenwriter Susan Soon He Stanton.
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.
The singers and the orchestra carry the show, but where do they carry it?
The Princeton Festival has long been a “Little Engine that Could,” but the current operatic offering, John Adams’ Nixon in China, is a good deal more than that.
I hardly know where to heap my praise first.
I really wished to avoid joining the pig pile of derision that has fallen on SF Opera’s premiere of John Adams and Peter Sellars’ Girls of the Golden West.
Curtis Opera Theater mounted a musically remarkable account of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic on March 2.
Missy Mazzoli, a 36-year-old composer from Brooklyn, has created the most startling and moving new American opera in memory.
Nixon in China is one of several titles that when I tell people that it’s on my Top Ten Favorite list of operas, I get strange looks.
Three blocks from the opera house is a terrible time to realize there was homework.
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.
Although Walter Braunfels was among those German composers whose music was banned in their home country after 1933, and whose political rehabilitiation in 1945 was not accompanied by a commensurate revival of his music, his 1920 opera Die Vögel should need no special pleading on musical or dramatic grounds. Though Braunfels is traditionally described as…
There were a disproportionate number of young people at the Met today—even younger than me, which is really young. That made me happy and smile while filing in line to enter the auditorium. Hopefully this is the next generation of undying fans and queens about to plunge into a “new” world of opera spearheaded by…
John Corigliano‘s first and second symphonies won the Grawemeyer and the Pulitzer, respectively; the premiere of his Third Symphony wasn’t even reviewed by the Times. His score for The Red Violin won an Oscar™; his score for Edge of Darkness ended up on the cutting room floor. Is there an American composer at once more…
The world needs a lot of things: health care, happiness, homo marriages, peace, prosperity and butterflies. What it doesn’t need is a mediocre “budget” recording of a contemporary opera already satisfactorily recorded with the original cast.
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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