OPERA THEATER REVIEWS

The Verdi Messa da Requiem—better known to English speakers as the Verdi Requiem—featuring the Cleveland Orchestra and its Chorus, with a quartet of soloists, breezed into Carnegie Hall the other night and promptly knocked many concert-goers out of their seats....

Daphne in Concert, Seattle Opera’s latest offering in their series of concert presentations initiated in 2023, proved that the series concept is a successful one....

Yoo-hoo, Metropolitan Opera. Looking for something new/old/odd/wonderful? I hope you made it to the Prototype Festival’s WHAT TO WEAR, by Michael Gordon and Richard Foreman, staged by Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson of Big Dance Theater following the original’s aesthetic from 2006. The opera just ...

From her first appearance on stage, it was clear that mezzo Aigul Akhmetshina was no flash in the pan when she gave us a scorching Carmen when this production was new just two years ago. The program describes the title character as “a force of nature” and that’s certainly what we got at the Me...

This is Beth Morrison’s first year as sole curator, producer and presenter of New York’s PROTOTYPE Festival of indie opera/music theatre. She’s also midwife for the birth of Sarah Kirkland Snider’s gorgeously composed HILDEGARD, its centerpiece, which I heard at the Gerald Lynch Theater at J...

Opera as a whole may be too reliant on museum pieces, on endless identikit revivals designed to secure bums on seats. But in the case of Richard Eyre’s 1994 La traviata, the old adage might be true: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it....

The Met’s new production of Vincenzo Bellini’s I PURITANI made its debut on New Year’s Eve, but I caught up with it at its third performance on January 6. I was glad I did--because it offered a cast with staggering singing abilities in four major roles that offered major demands, along with at...

The program said “Christmas Night Opera” but it didn’t happen till the 27th at Carnegie Hall. The date didn’t matter, with such a grand evening for hearing Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Delibes, Verdi and others with some top voices, including Grigorian, Sierra, Radvanovsky and Jagde seeming to have...

Lincoln Center Theater’s new Kenny Leon production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s AMAHL AND THE NIGHT VISITORS, presented in association with the Metropolitan Opera, is hardly “A Charlie Brown Christmas” or “The Nutcracker.” Yet it manages to give us faith, hope and charity at a time we could a...

The Royal Opera House’s Turandot has now been running so long it feels less like a revival and more like a listed structure. You don’t attend it so much as pass through it, like a familiar corridor or a particularly grand roundabout. With close to 300 performances under its belt and two runs in ...

As the houselights dim at the Metropolitan Opera, the Julie Taymor–directed The Magic Flute transports viewers into a buoyant and kaleidoscopic fairy-tale dreamworld. This abridged, English-language production is a visually sumptuous version of Mozart's singspiel bathed in bold primary colors, sha...

Musically impressive with real high points, the drama does not quite hold together...

When I read that the Met, in the program notes for James Robinson’s production of PORGY AND BESS, called it “a supremely American operatic masterpiece” I couldn’t help but think of Stephen Sondheim’s answer (perhaps apocryphal) when he was asked whether SWEENEY TODD was an opera or a music...

We still don’t know what Kurt Cobain did in the days before his suicide in 1994. Gus Van Sant offered one hallucinatory guess in Last Days, refashioned into opera by Oliver Leith and now revived at the Royal Ballet And Opera....

Performed with exquisite control by the Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, the hour-long concert of DAVID LANG'S THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL PASSION becomes something far larger than the sum of its parts....

For those of us who like verismo opera—combining the raw emotions of everyday people with historical splendor—but have heard one too many BOHEMEs, TOSCAs, TURANDOTs and BUTTERFLYs in this lifetime, noting Giordano’s ANDREA CHENIER in the Met’s repertoire for this season seemed like a godsend...

Here are all the hallmarks of any good Shakespearean comedy: love polygons, gender trouble and a shipwreck to get things going. However, in Handel’s Partenope there is one crucial difference: everyone here is self-aware....

For all those operagoers tired of classics set in rodeos, Las Vegas or on a space station (Paris has a BOHEME of that ilk), Otto Schenk’s production for ARABELLA, with stage design by Gunther Schneider Siemssen, dating back to 1983, will be a relief. It features a return to “old Vienna,” inclu...

A confession. It’s a guilty pleasure of mine to read the death notices on Wikipedia - I am my mother’s son after all and, without the columns of classifieds in the Liverpool Echo, where else is there to look?...

San Diego Opera opened its 2025-26 season on a Halloween night with an appropriately disturbing opera about a murderous clown. Its unsavory plot hasn’t kept Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci from becoming one of opera’s most popular creations. The reasons for its success? A can’t-wait-for-it t...

Some of the audience at the chamber concert at the Frick Collection Museum—that jewel-box museum of art from the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century on New York’s Upper East Side—had fought its way there through the runners of the NYC Marathon. What they found was definitely worth the e...

It’s hard for a soprano to get a break in Donizetti’s LA FILLE DU REGIMENT, which I caught up with at the Met on Friday evening. Not that Marie—the role of the title, sung at the Met by Erin Morley—doesn’t have some gorgeous music and shenanigans to show off her musical and comic chops in ...

It’s World Opera Day—an annual event held on October 25—a collaboration between OPERA America, Opera Europa, and Ópera Latinoamérica to showcase the ways opera companies and artists add vigor to their countries, communities and the world....

Charles Gounod took Shakespeare’s tale of the star-crossed lovers and adapted it to create the 1867 opera, Roméo et Juliette, with an overture and Shakespeare’s explanatory prologue, delivered by the chorus, followed by a five-act opera, with a libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré. ...

What did our critic think of PORGY AND BESS at Houston Grand Opera? As Houston performing arts ventures grow for the 2025-26 season, Houston Grand Opera surpasses them all with a thrilling 50th anniversary production of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. S...