The latest reviews and critic recommendations from Opera.
I couldn’t help thinking of a new science fiction-comedy series on Amazon during the local premiere of UPLOAD, the opera by Michel van der Aa at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday.
Another work salvaged from this year’s Covid-aborted Prototype Festival has shown up in New York--at Brooklyn’s St.
If Friday night’s performance of Handel’s RODELINDA sometimes seemed like it was never going to end--it was quickly approaching the witching hour by the time the curtain calls were over, having started at 7:30--it certainly wasn’t the fault of the cast but Handel himself and librettist Nicola
The original title of the Sondheim-Laurents ANYONE CAN WHISTLE was THE NATIVES ARE RESTLESS, though the crowd at Carnegie Hall on Thursday for the MasterVoices concert performance of the trouble musical were hardly fidgety.
I love seeing in the arts when a company takes a classic work and reimagines it for a modern audience.
A romantic burlesque turns out to be an abstract path to nothingness through perverse vanity.
The Washington National Opera has gathered a company of first rate singers for a portmanteau of four, one-act operas called Written in Stone.
I flipped over Lise Davidsen when she made her Met debut in QUEEN OF SPADES—the voice, the acting, the overall subtlety--but I was still unprepared for the performance she gave as the Prima Donna who became Princess Ariadne of Crete in Strauss’s ARIADNE AUF NAXOS.
DON CARLOS--Verdi’s original French language version, for the first time at the Met, of the opera better known in these parts as the Italian DON CARLO--was as grim as its setting in the Spanish inquisition in the new David McVicar production introduced last night.
When this year’s PROTOTYPE Festival was put off for a year because of Covid concerns, some of the pieces went into mothballs.
I admire the plucky inventiveness of the San Diego Opera.
It’s no secret that many of the standard repertoire’s most famous operas had troubled premieres but Beethoven’s FIDELIO had more than its share.
Bold new production of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s iconic rendering of the classic Greek tragedy
Another revival of a beautifully realised crowdpleaser that works perfectly in the difficult days of February 2022.
INTIMATE APPAREL appeared this week at LCT’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater, directed adroitly by Bartlett Sher, with a thoughtful libretto by Lynn Nottage based on her award-winning play and a ragtime-inflected score by composer Ricky Ian Gordon.
It took longer to read the notes for Joan Tower’s “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, No.
Ricky Ian Gordon and Michael Korie, in their new opera for New York City Opera and National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene, weren’t the only ones to be inspired by the famed 1962 novel THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS (IL GIARDINO DEI FINZI CONTINI) by Italian Giorgio Bassani.
It's not every day that Audra McDonald stands twenty feet in front of you and says, 'Tonight, we are all a part of history.
Puccini's 'La Boheme,' returned for its second run of the season this week and cast and conductor delivered the goods.
Gina Galati's marvelous Winter Opera company has mounted a delightful production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers.
When I saw the George Grosz-ish curtain that introduced us to the new Barlett Sher “Weimar-inspired” production of Verdi’s RIGOLETTO at the Met on New Year’s Eve, I was excited about what lay ahead.
What is there to say about Puccini’s TOSCA that hasn’t been said in the last hundred-plus years since its premiere in Rome (to echo the locations in the opera)? It is a marvel of brevity, with librettists Illica and Giacosa shaving locations, characters and action from the original play, written
It seems variety is the spice of classical music and opera in San Diego.
Talk about ‘spoiler alerts,’ there was a big one for me early in the opera, EURYDICE, by Matthew Aucoin to a libretto that he and Sarah Ruhl fashioned from her play of the same name, which had its Met premiere last night.
Some curious directorial choices fail to blunt the force of Wagner's musical donner und blitzen as the gods bicker and bully and the mortals bleed
