OPERA

by Aliya Al-Hassan - May 22, 2026

Tosca is Giacomo Puccini's fast-paced thriller of an opera; brimming with tension and political intrigue. For many it is Puccini's best work, yet incredibly it has never been staged at Glyndebourne. Until now. It is a show of firsts all round: the first mainstage production for director Ted Huffman...

by Richard Sasanow - May 19, 2026

I caught up with Heartbeat Opera’s reinvention of Samuel Barber’s 1958 opera, VANESSA, to Giancarlo Menotti’s libretto, a few days after its debut at the Baruch Performing Arts Center in New York, after premiering last summer at the Williamstown (MA) Theatre Festival....

by Richard Sasanow - May 15, 2026

The story of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera—two great Mexican artists who also happened to be in a tempestuous marriage—seems tailor-made for the opera stage. They struggled in their art, as well as in their lives and relationship with one another. Passions explode. So it’s not surprising to see...

by Michael Higgs - May 14, 2026

This revival of Richard Jones’s 2022 production of Samson et Dalila excels on a musical level with spectacular performances by Aigul Akhmetshina as Dalila and SeokJong Baek as Samson....

by Alexander Cohen - May 09, 2026

Peter Grimes hinges on balancing the duality between its chorus and Grimes as an individual. In one corner the spectacle of the mob, bustling and boiling with rage in their witch hunt for Grimes, and in the other corner is lonely fisherman Grimes himself, whose mental breakdown demands gutturally in...

by Richard Sasanow - May 08, 2026

Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho wasn’t the first Violetta of this season’s LA TRAVIATA by Verdi at the Met. That means less rehearsal time and preparation in general—but you could have fooled me and the rest of the audience at Wednesday’s performance. She was in tiptop shape, after a bit of w...

by Erica Miner - May 03, 2026

The production, with its flamboyantly portrayed characters and colorful background, fulfilled the most crowd-pleasing elements of the work...

by Louise Penn - May 02, 2026

Ana Inés Jabares-Pita's set feels familiar and clearly defines time and place: The Departure remains in the 1960s; Making Arrangements moves into the 1970s, where a woman could choose to live independently; Four Sisters is in the materialistic 1980s, where 'greed is good'. The changes of style in ...

by Richard Sasanow - April 28, 2026

In case we had to be reminded—after the Met’s recent Laffont Competition lineup, where three Juilliard singers were among the finalists—the Juilliard School is among the top sources of the next generation of opera singers (among many other categories, of course). Two of those singers were in t...

by Richard Sasanow - April 25, 2026

There was a time early in this century when conductor Lorin Maazel led Massenet’s opera THAIS, surprising audiences by picking up a violin during Act II to play the work’s famous “Meditation” himself—usually the realm of the concertmaster. At the NY Philharmonic’s performance of Poulenc�...