Britten’s penultimate opera, the anti-war ghost story Owen Wingrave, was composed for television performance in 1971.
Odyssey Opera’s Ägyptische Helena was a beautifully executed production of a flawed opera.
Hansel and Gretel might just be the best thing the Met has done so far this season.
The tendency to rank—to create subjective lists of best or greatest, or to organize things in ascending or descending order—is a human compulsion.
This week’s “Trove Thursday” offers Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice featuring Anthony Rolfe Johnson.
A poster outside Carnegie Hall proclaimed “Mahler Well Met” and to some degree it proved to be true.
Let’s call this meeting to order. My name is Patrick and I’m a boxset-aholic.
Missy Mazzoli, a 36-year-old composer from Brooklyn, has created the most startling and moving new American opera in memory.
“What fools these mortals be!”
Subtitled by its creators as “A Fearful Radio Show,” this opera reminded Jerome Robbins of Orson Welles’ 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds.
You don’t often hear the grand operas of Benjamin Britten on smaller stages.
WNO’s first complete Ring Cycle continued Monday evening with a revamped version of the Die Walküre first seen at the Kennedy Center in 2007.
Without fail, all nine finalists had nice clear ringing voices. Whether they develop into great artists is another question.
Unlike my friend Greg Freed, who entertainingly wrote of his ambivalence about seeing Il trovatore in a movie theater this season, I have embraced the Met Live in HD transmissions as a part of the modern operagoing experience.
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.
By some quirk of fate, I tend to hear about the deaths of many operatic legends via radio news while out driving.
My memory is fading but the events I recall most vividly of the last season seem largely to have been concert performances.
The Little Opera Theater of New York (LOTNY) is presenting a double-cast run of two of Floyd’s early one-acts, Slow Dusk and Markheim.
Benjamin Britten’s final opera Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella, is given a lush and quite beautiful production from stage director Deborah Warner for the English National Opera.
George Benjamin’s 2012 opera Written on Skin received great acclaim at its opening at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, and the Royal Opera quickly mounted it in March 2013.
The sea, the sky, the wind, the storms that are so frequently depicted in the music of Benjamin Britten are brilliantly illuminated in the new DVD of Peter Grimes on Aldeburgh Beach, a collaboration between Aldeburgh Music, film director Margaret Williams, and stage director Tim Albery.
We were not at Carnegie Hall to hear superb opera singers bestow their vocalism upon Alban Berg’s Wozzeck; we are there to hear the Wiener Staatsoper’s house band work their magic upon an intricate, spooky, devastating score.
Ambiguity. That’s the theme of the operas of Benjamin Britten (ennobled as Baron Britten of Aldeburgh).
In any narrative, the unmentioned—the unmentionable—will always be more alarming than that which is carefully described.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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