Ahead of his new production of Die Frau ohne Schatten, Barrie Kosky chats with Kevin Ng in Aix about pretty much everything — except the details of his new Frau.
Barrie Kosky’s zany production of The Nose time-steps back onto the Komische Oper Berlin stage.
A stark, sweltering performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk shocks the Komische Oper Berlin.
Les Brigands at the Paris Opera is an expensive joke that never lands
A Trove Thursday Mega-Post © featuring the wonderful American soprano Erin Morley in Orff’s Carmina Burana and Richard Strauss’s Brentano Lieder, plus extended live excerpts from Handel’s Orlando, Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots.
In the past when I’ve read through the scads of year-end best lists, there have always been a few titles that I just didn’t “get” but there were more than usual in 2020.
Starring Marlis Petersen, Susan Graham, Daniel Brenna, Paul Groves, Johan Reuter and Franz Grundheber, conducted by Lothar Koenigs. From November 21, 2015.
This Met’s second production of Berg’s 1935 opera was the hot topic of November 2015.
anatomy theater, receiving its New York premiere Saturday night at this year’s Prototype Festival, is a conceptual exercise in which nothing, absolutely nothing is left to the imagination.
David Lang is, per The New Yorker, a “postminimalist enfant terrible.”
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.
Lilith. Pandora. Circe. Salome. “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” Carmen. Brigid O’Shaughnessy: the eternal “femme fatale” still fascinates us.
Throw in a trio of murders and a healthy splash of vodka and you have, more or less, the plot of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
They say that Boston, despite many cultural distinctions, ain’t no opera town, and for some decades—generations?—this has been true. But tides of change will break, even on the shores of the Hub.
Opera-lovers who attend too much modern opera may find that it feels like duty.
Zofia Posmysz spent two years as a prisoner in Auschwitz—and she’s still alive and standing pretty tall, in New York for the Lincoln Center Festival God bless her.
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.
It took about 30 minutes for me to grow restless watching the world premiere video of Gyorgi Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre from Gran Teatre del Liceu.
When Mikhail Gorbachev assumed the mantle of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, a palpable change was felt in the air, from Novosibirsk to East Berlin. Words like glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) began to replace the gradually outmoded Leninist philosophies that had become warped under Stalin and Andropov.
Another grim narrative of the Gelb years, and one I think is generally hogwash, is that the Met has (at least in theatrical terms) lost its way entirely.
Look, this is a very special piece of music for me. You were twenty once, right? You were self-righteous. You had your musical heroes, and your mind was being remolded every fifteen minutes or so by a rapid succession of new experiences that challenged your notions of what music could do.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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