Goodbye, Nostalgia! Goodbye, Nostalgia!

The program was set around themes of loss, of unfulfilled wishes, the endurance of loss, triumphant or depressed.

You aren’t any good to me dead You aren’t any good to me dead

The Murder of Halit Yozgat by Ben Frost and Petter Ekmann is flavorsome in its use of sound, vocal and otherwise, to explore the elements of the story, to keep you tied in, and guessing.

The beautiful doom is empty The beautiful doom is empty

The Met is on it with something something woker than woke: a noirish psychodrama of a frigid hysteric who seeks redemption via Freudian analysis!

Medium cool Medium cool

Nico Muhly has set himself the task of presenting Winston Graham’s elusive heroine Marnie on the operatic stage.

A whiter shade of pale A whiter shade of pale

While the celebrity-studded, expensively-dressed audience gathered for the gala opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2015-2016 season seemed genuinely enthralled by Monday evening’s performance of Otello, it was more likely swept away by the power of Verdi’s genius than by Bartlett Sher’s puzzling, inert new production.

The Met: Can it be saved? The Met: Can it be saved?

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.

Britten on the wind Britten on the wind

Ambiguity. That’s the theme of the operas of Benjamin Britten (ennobled as Baron Britten of Aldeburgh).

Two ghosts

The ENO was filled with ghosts last week. Spectral, possibly illusory figures fleetingly materialized in the Internet chatrooms that provide the setting for much of Nico Muhly’s new opera Two Boys, and brutal boarding school memories came back to troubled life in director Christopher Alden’s dark take on Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.