Michael Hersch took no prisoners with his new opera, AND WE, EACH, a production of the Baltimore musical organization, Mind on Fire, which had its New York premiere on February 6 at National Sawdust in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Anyone who’s spent enough time watching network TV knows an American criminal justice system that is built around simplistic stories of the good guys (hard-working prosecutors and police detectives) putting away the bad guys (“perps” of all stripes) with the help of brilliant DNA evidence that
Even though there’s no shortage of contemporary opera around, we all still long for the rediscovery of a delightful operatic work from the archives, particularly a comedy, of which there is a short supply.
ARIANA MATER, the opera by Kaija Saariaho, who died last summer at 70, won this year's Grammy for Best Opera Recording, for the Deutsche Grammophon recording issued last August.
The 17th and 18th centuries rode roughshod over the programming at the 92NY the other night, when that brilliant British baroque ensemble, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and superb guest soloist, soprano Julia Bullock, bathed the audience in the warmth of what itself acknowledged was a l
The New York premiere of the Christopher Cerrone/Stephanie Fleischmann opera IN A GROVE, in Mary Birnbaum’s simply beautiful—or beautifully simple—production triumphed at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club on Saturday as part of the Prototype Festival.
The lobby of the HERE Theatre in SoHo was buzzing after Saturday’s performance of the new opera EAT THE DOCUMENT—not just for the performance we’d just watched but for the memories of the age that the piece evoked for many in the audience.
New York’s annual PROTOTYPE Festival—produced by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, which has been showcasing visionary, nontraditional opera-theatre and music-theatre pieces since 2013—kicked off its 2025 edition on January 9 followed by BLACK LODGE/BARDO, IN A GROVE, POSITIVE VIBRATION NATION,
Someone at the Met should have been giving out flu shots (before RFK Junior makes them illegal), because something is obviously going around the cast of the new AIDA.
Richard Strauss’s DIE FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN (THE WOMAN WITHOUT A SHADOW), with a libretto by his long-time collaborator, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, has made a triumphant return to the Met with a stellar cast and the Met Orchestra in peak form under Yannick Nezet-Seguin.
As usual, the gala concert of the Richard Tucker Music Foundation started off with an interloper from the golden age of opera: Richard Tucker himself, singing Mascagni’s “Addio alla Madre” from CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA.
I must admit that the Met’s current revival of IL TROVATORE--with RIGOLETTO and TRAVIATA, considered the great creations of Verdi’s middle period--made me think of another masterwork, “A Night at the Opera,” my favorite of the movies by those champions of silliness, the Marx Brothers.
Osvaldo Golijov’s AINADAMAR, which made its Met debut this week, with a libretto translated by the composer from the English original by David Henry Hwang, isn’t the first Spanish language opera at the Met, but it’s certainly the first to sound that way.
The Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center—an unfamiliar name for an orchestra that was around for over half a century, as the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra—and its new maestro, Jonathon Heyward, are playing a role in Lincoln Center’s attempt to draw a more diverse audience to its campus at W
“A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,” according to Disney’s “Mary Poppins.
“In Rigoletto we're dealing with abuse of women, male power, rape, murder.
It's Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1828 and the city's world-renowned anatomy schools are suffering from a cadaver shortage.
Though the classical music season is still young, it'll be tough for anything that lies ahead to compete with Friday night's performance at Carnegie Hall by Martha Argerich, who seemed to be having the time of her life, while showing total skill and control.
There are opera festivals and then there are OPERA FESTIVALS, but none that promise to be the equivalent of Opera Philadelphia's O17, which opens on September 14 for a 12-day run.
Audiences at the New York Philharmonic have been known to come for the soloists and then slip out for the symphony.
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