Supported by an ingenious production and strong performances, Antonia Bembo’s Ercole Amante makes a successful Paris Opera debut.
Led by a mesmerizing Anthony Roth Costanzo, Satyagraha at the Paris Opera dispenses with historical particularities for something for more elusive.
Offenbach‘s Robinson Crusoé is salvaged from obscurity.
Needing a Mozart palate-cleanser after the recent misbegotten Marriage of Figaro, I went back more than two decades for a Houston Così fan Tutte featuring then-rising Americans Christine Goerke, Joyce Di Donato, Richard Croft, and Nathan Gunn as the confused lovers.
As an opera fanatic who was baptized by the blood of Leontyne Price, the Messa da Requiem by Giuseppe Verdi appeared on my radar fairly soon after I started delving into the operatic canon.
Friday evening’s Met premiere of Akhnaten was a resounding triumph and an outstanding testament to Philip Glass’s enduring operatic vision.
BAM brings us a political opera featuring… literal balancing acts.
I hardly know where to heap my praise first.
Sometimes the fates conspire, preventing an artist from recording the role for which he is his generation’s touchstone.
I finally get to complete my personal operatic Top Ten this week with Igor Stravinsky’s only full-length opera, The Rake’s Progress.
“In my music, there’s not repetition. Something is always going on.”
Akhnaten, seen at the Los Angeles Opera on November 13 tells the story of the Pharaoh who abandoned traditional Egyptian polytheism.
Philip Glass is indisputably one of the most prolific composers of the last half century, yet none of his more than 20 operas has found a place in the standard repertoire.
Saturday’s Washington National Opera premiere of a new version of Philip Glass and Christopher Hampton’s Appomattox had everything going for it but the opera.
It was a night a-tingle with excitement at the Metropolitan Opera House.
Short answer: yes. But let’s begin by dismissing the a blatant canard. One thing that the Metropolitan Opera does not need to do is to scale back the number of performances in a season.
“Is a work an opera simply because its creators choose to call it one?”
Camille Saint-Saëns was such a brilliant, facile musician that pals like Wagner and Liszt felt a distinct schadenfreude when he suffered composer’s block.
The New Year’s Eve gala at the Met ushering out 2011 was the world premiere of the much-anticipated mash-up The Enchanted Island AKA “baroque opera for those who hate (or at least don’t know) baroque opera.
As suggested in Part I of this piece, to experience Glass’s Satyagraha as a purely aesthetic experience is unfortunately to succumb to a romantic ideology promoting detached reflection on art which is wholly inapplicable to such a politically-charged opera. The idea that Gandhi’s action-oriented philosophy would be packaged and sold for the sake of passive…
That Philip Glass’s opera about Gandhi’s nonviolent civil disobedience should be revived by the Metropolitan Opera in 2011—a year marked by nonviolent revolutions and uprisings around the globe—is timely, to say the least. The most recent production of his Satyagraha (1979) was first premiered by the Met in the spring of 2008 as America stood…
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…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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