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Review: Davidsen, an ISOLDE for the Ages, Alongside Spyres' Splendid TRISTAN in Wagner at the Met
Voice! Voice! And more voice! That’s what we got from the Met’s new production of Wagner’s TRISTAN UND ISOLDE last night, especially from the glorious soprano of Lise Davidsen as the Irish princess Isolde, with no small help from her Tristan, baritenor Michael Spyres....
Review: ROMÉO ET JULIETTE at Winter Opera
Opera is widely considered to be a seasonal flower. Around the world opera festivals show their shoots in early spring, they blossom in the summer, and they stretch their glory into the fall. In St. Louis, though, we find one of the few fine opera companies willing to brave the icy blasts of win...
Review: THE OPERA LOCOS, Sadler's Wells
If you have ever suspected that opera might benefit from fewer Valkyries and more vaudeville, Opera Locos is here to confirm your prejudice and then sing it at you in Italian....
Review: DiDonato Brings Dickinson Poems to Life through Brilliant Song Cycle by Puts at Carnegie
Though only a handful of Emily Dickinson’s hundreds of poems were published during her lifetime (more than 1700 others were found posthumously), she is best known as a risk-taking writer whose work straddled the line between the straightforward and the more abstract. Inaddition, she has long been ...
Review: LA BOHÈME, in Cinemas
What did our critic think of LA BOHEME IN CINEMAS at Cinemas Across The UK?...
Review: THE BARBER OF SEVILLE BY ROSSINI at San Diego Civic Center Theater
Rossini’s Barber of Seville is a top ten opera in performances. Donors love it for its vocal gymnastics, memorable arias and sparkling melodies. Receptive newcomers like it because of its delightful bubbling overture, the familiar Figaro aria that soon follows, and its simple fast-moving sitcom-li...
Review: COSÌ FAN TUTTE, London Coliseum
Phelim McDermott directing Così fan tutte is a bit like asking a Catholic priest to do Mass in full drag. You know something deliciously outrageous is going to happen. You also know, whether people will like it or not, that it might be exactly what this masterpiece out of step with modern attitudes...
Review: BORIS GUDUNOV, Royal Ballet And Opera
If Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov were a dinner party, Richard Jones’s Russian-language revival at the Royal Opera House would be the dinner date where you arrive bright and curious and leave questioning your life choices, nursing a neat whisky in a corner. This is not an opera that gives up its sec...
Review: Bullock, Woods and Hanick Are Anything but ORDINARY THINGS at NY's 92nd Street Y
The audience at New York’s 92nd Street Y the other night was certainly happy to be at a recital, “From Ordinary Things,” by the trio of soprano Julia Bullock, with her colleagues Seth Parler Wood on cello and pianist Conor Hanick. But there was almost nothing traditional about the proce...
Review: HMS Pinafore, London Coliseum
A revival of Cal McCrystal’s 2021 production, HMS Pinafore at the London Coliseum charms with wit, a stunning cast, and gorgeous Victorian designs....
Review: Cleveland Orchestra’s Splendid VERDI REQUIEM at Carnegie Hall
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....
Review: DAPHNE IN CONCERT at McCaw Hall
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....
Review: The Gordon-Foreman WHAT TO WEAR is Totally Wonderful at Prototype in BAM's Harvey
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 ...
Review: CARMEN Sizzles with Akhmetshina Heading Stellar Cast at the Met
From her first appearance on stage, it was clear that mezzo Aigul Akhmetshina was no flash in the pan, giving 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 Met, in ...
Review: Snider’s Brilliant Score Anchors HILDEGARD at Prototype under Pulitzer’s Caring Eye
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...
Review: LA TRAVIATA, Royal Ballet And Opera
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....
Review: PURITANI Is Bel Canto Bliss with Oropesa and Brownlee under Armiliato's Baton
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...
Review: Warhorses? Hi Yo, Silver, With Sierra, Grigorian, Radvanovsky, Jagde at Carnegie Hall
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...
Review: Before There Was Charlie Brown, There Was Menotti’s AMAHL, now at Lincoln Center Theater
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...
Review: TURANDOT, Royal Ballet And Opera
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 ...
Review: MOZART’S THE MAGIC FLUTE at The Metropolitan Opera
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...
Review: ARIODANTE, Royal Ballet and Opera
Musically impressive with real high points, the drama does not quite hold together...
Review: PORGY AND BESS Raises the Roof at the Metropolitan
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...
Review: LAST DAYS, Royal Ballet And Opera
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....
Review: THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL PASSION at The Church Of The Intercession
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....
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