The latest reviews and critic recommendations from Opera.
Glass feels to be in direct conversation with grand opera, layering incantations from the chorus over triangulations of notes played nearly ad nauseam on violas to evoke something of the mystery that shrouds ancient Egypt in western culture.
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.
Opera is widely considered to be a seasonal flower.
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.
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.
What did our critic think of LA BOHEME IN CINEMAS at Cinemas Across The UK?
Rossini’s Barber of Seville is a top ten opera in performances.
Phelim McDermott directing Così fan tutte is a bit like asking a Catholic priest to do Mass in full drag.
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.
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.
A revival of Cal McCrystal’s 2021 production, HMS Pinafore at the London Coliseum charms with wit, a stunning cast, and gorgeous Victorian designs.
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.
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.
This is Beth Morrison’s first year as sole curator, producer and presenter of New York’s PROTOTYPE Festival of indie opera/music theatre.
Opera as a whole may be too reliant on museum pieces, on endless identikit revivals designed to secure bums on seats.
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.
The program said “Christmas Night Opera” but it didn’t happen till the 27th at Carnegie Hall.
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.
The Royal Opera House’s Turandot has now been running so long it feels less like a revival and more like a listed structure.
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.
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.
