OPERA

by Ron Bierman - April 03, 2026

Carmen is the world’s third most performed opera. Its tale of the doomed love affair between an innocent young soldier and a beguiling young woman unconstrained by conventional beliefs was seen in more than 6,000 productions on five continents last year. This performance was in the opera’s origi...

by Michael Higgs - March 27, 2026

A new production by Natalie Abrahami and Michael Levine, The Turn of the Screw at the Royal Opera House haunts with eerie staging, finely judged performances, and Benjamin Britten’s still-chilling score....

by Franco Milazzo - March 26, 2026

When this Rigoletto first opened the Royal Opera House’s first full season after the long pandemic silence, it felt less like a return to normality and more like a statement of intent. To relaunch with Rigoletto, arguably Giuseppe Verdi’s bleakest work, was a bold, almost confrontational choice....

by Richard Sasanow - March 23, 2026

Composer David Lang’s THE WEALTH OF NATIONS had a splendid world premiere this week at the New York Philharmonic under Artistic Director Designate Gustavo Dudamel, with mezzo Fleur Barron, bass-baritone Davone Tines and the Philharmonic’s chorus (under Malcolm Merriweather)....

by Richard Sasanow - March 17, 2026

If you’re thinking of the muscle-bound hero of action films—or even Disney animation—boy, have you got the wrong HERCULES. As soon as Harry Bicket and his early music ensemble, ‘The English Concert,’ played their first notes of the overture at Carnegie Hall the other afternoon, we knew we ...

by Andrew Child - March 13, 2026

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....

by Richard Sasanow - March 10, 2026

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....

by Steve Callahan - March 02, 2026

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...

by Franco Milazzo - February 26, 2026

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....

by Richard Sasanow - February 23, 2026

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 ...