DON PASQUALE

Vancouver Opera will continue the 2023-2024 season with a dazzling production of Gaetano Donizetti's classic comic opera, Don Pasquale. ...

An historic recording of golden age tenor Richard Tucker singing “Sound an Alarm” from Handel’s JUDAS MACCABEUS” set the tone for the Richard Tucker Music Foundation’s Gala concert at Carnegie Hall. There was wonderful singing ahead of us—but of a certain kind. Like many other classical organizations, the Tucker Foundation, has found that, as Charles Dickens said in “A Tale of Two Cities,” “It was the best of times, the worst of times.” The “best” is for the quality of the singers that the foun...

​​​​​​​Ivo van Hove, the Tony Award–winning director of Broadway's A View from the Bridge, makes a major Met debut with Mozart's Don Giovanni (May 5–June 2), re-setting the familiar tale of deceit and damnation in an abstract architectural landscape and shining a light into the work's dark corners....

Combine a supreme farceur with a stentorian voice that thrills and you get baritone Michael Volle’s portrayal of the title role in Verdi’s FALSTAFF, which breezed into town late last week for a limited run at the Met. While we’ve had dramatic singers in the role before, they were mostly from Italian repertoire; I don’t know when the last time a Wagnerian--a Wotan from the Ring, for instance--took on this role around here, but Volle did himself proud....

Opera Saratoga's board of directors has announced that Mary Birnbaum has been named the company's new general and artistic director. She succeeds former General and Artistic Director Lawrence Edelson, whose eight year tenure concluded at the end of the 2022 season. Birnbaum is the tenth general director in the Opera Saratoga's celebrated history. ...

After their first, full, in-person season in over a year, AVA has announced their 2022/23 opera season! With last season's productions being called a 'complete triumph from its start to its finish' (Chestnut Hill Local), AVA's 88th season is sure to delight opera audiences....

Soprano Eleonora Buratto takes on the touchstone title role of the tragic geisha, following earlier Met successes as Norina in Don Pasquale and Liù in Turandot. Tenor Brian Jagde is the callous American naval officer who betrays her, alongside mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong as her devoted maid Suzuki and baritone David Bizic as the consul Sharpless. Alexander Soddy conducts Anthony Minghella’s evocative, ever-popular staging. ...

On the Los Angeles Opera website, tenor Russell Thomas and collaborative pianist Kyung-Mi Kim present a program of song that includes Schumann's song cycle, Dichterliebe (Poet's Love),  Handel's aria “Total Eclipse” from Samson, and love songs by Adolphus Hailstork and Robert Owens that was filmed recently at Spivey Hall in Atlanta, Georgia. ...

I couldn’t help but admire Anna Netrebko’s taking on many of the pieces that comprised her concert from Vienna’s historic Spanish Riding School on February 6, which was part of the Met Stars Live in Concert. They may not have fit her voice to a tee but she almost made you think they did. ...