Opera Theater Reviews: Best Shows & Critic Recommendations Page 16

BWW Review: DON JUAN at Wroclaw Opera
by Natalia Jarczynska - March 09, 2022

A romantic burlesque turns out to be an abstract path to nothingness through perverse vanity. Must see....

BWW Review: WRITTEN IN STONE at Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater
by Mary Lincer - March 07, 2022

The Washington National Opera has gathered a company of first rate singers for a portmanteau of four, one-act operas called Written in Stone. Unfortunately, their fine skills and exceptional voices cannot make silk purses out of scores, libretti, and orchestrations that evade aesthetics, emphasize n...

BWW Review: Lise Davidsen Soars Over Naxos in Strauss's ARIADNE at the Met
by Richard Sasanow - March 04, 2022

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. She was altogether divine....

BWW Review: Now in the Original French, Met's New Production of Verdi's DON CARLOS Shows Off Impressive Cast
by Richard Sasanow - March 01, 2022

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. And about as long (though for once ...

BWW Review: Opera Schmopera. Taylor Mac and His Collaborators Will Help You Get THE HANG of It
by Richard Sasanow - February 27, 2022

When this year’s PROTOTYPE Festival was put off for a year because of Covid concerns, some of the pieces went into mothballs. Taylor Mac’s THE HANG, under the auspices of HERE, one of New York’s major downtown arts organizations, based in Tribeca, decided to, uh, hang around....

BWW Review: San Diego Opera's MOZART'S COSI FAN TUTTE at San Diego Civic Center
by Ron Bierman - February 17, 2022

I admire the plucky inventiveness of the San Diego Opera. On an annual budget of roughly three percent of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, it has managed to mount a consistently appealing and entertaining variety of productions, traditional and contemporary, in both good times and plague times. The la...

BWW Review: FIDELIO at the Met – Not THE MET – Proves Beethoven's Only Opera Is No Museum Piece
by Richard Sasanow - February 16, 2022

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. Thanks to the efforts of Heartbeat Opera, which performed its revised version at New York’s Met Museum this past weekend (before a short tour), we can see ...

BWW Review: ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE at Tagney Jones Hall
by Erica Miner - February 14, 2022

Bold new production of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s iconic rendering of the classic Greek tragedy...

BWW Review: LA BOHÈME, London Coliseum
by Gary Naylor - February 03, 2022

Another revival of a beautifully realised crowdpleaser that works perfectly in the difficult days of February 2022....

BWW Review: An INTIMATE Look at the New Gordon-Nottage Opera at Lincoln Center Theater
by Richard Sasanow - February 01, 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....

BWW Review: Costanzo and Bond Join Prokofiev and van Zweden at the Philharmonic
by Richard Sasanow - January 30, 2022

It took longer to read the notes for Joan Tower’s “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, No. 1” than it did for the New York Philharmonic under Jaap van Zweden to kick off the first program in its current concert series, “Authentic Selves: The Beauty Within”. But it was a fitting opening for the evening, ...

BWW Review: GARDEN OF FINZI-CONTINIS at City Opera-NYTF Is Too Much of a Good Thing
by Richard Sasanow - January 29, 2022

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. The film version, by Vitto...

BWW Review: Audra McDonald and Dr. Phillips Center Make History with Duke Ellington's BLACK, BROWN & BEIGE
by Aaron Wallace - January 27, 2022

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.' Then again, it's not every day that music history gets made in Orlando - real-deal, textbook-worthy history - so when it does happen, I reckon Audra McDonald is as eager to be...

BWW Review: LA BOHEME Returns to The MET
by Peter Danish - January 20, 2022

Puccini's 'La Boheme,' returned for its second run of the season this week and cast and conductor delivered the goods. There's nothing to say that has not already been said about La Boheme as an opera and the famous Zeffirelli production, so we won't dwell on it....

BWW Review: New Year, New RIGOLETTO at Met Highlights Good Singing
by Richard Sasanow - January 02, 2022

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. Combined with Verdi’s great score, it seemed bound for success. What followed was disappointing, desp...

BWW Review: Radvanovsky's TOSCA a Winner for the Met
by Richard Sasanow - December 18, 2021

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 by ...

BWW Review: SAN DIEGO OPERA PRESENTS ARTURO CHACÓN-CRUZ at California Center For The Arts, Escondido
by Ron Bierman - December 09, 2021

It seems variety is the spice of classical music and opera in San Diego. The city’s symphony orchestra plans to appear in a dozen or more venues next year, and the opera company has used a different venue for each of its three recent recital concerts. The latest of these featured Mexican-born tenor ...

BWW Review: At the Met, EURYDICE Edges Out Orpheus for the Center of Attention in Premiere
by Richard Sasanow - November 24, 2021

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. Eurydice tells Orpheus “Don’t look at me,” which to me mirrored the scene at t...

BWW Review: THE VALKYRIE, London Coliseum
by Gary Naylor - November 20, 2021

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 ...

BWW Review: 'L'ORFEO' May Be the Title Role in Rossi's Opera but Euridice is the Star at Juilliard
by Richard Sasanow - November 18, 2021

In Rossi's L'ORFEO at Juilliard, but director Birnbaum explores the idea that “destiny happens to you whether you like it or not, and no matter how much humans try to have control over their environment and future.” Or, as the popular expression goes, “Man makes plans and God laughs.”...

BWW Review: Met's First BOHEME of the Season Had the Audience Where It Wanted It
by Richard Sasanow - November 12, 2021

Every time I head to a performance of Puccini’s LA BOHEME, I can’t help but think of Bette Davis’s famous line from “All About Eve”: “I detest cheap sentiment.” But then I actually get there and, more likely than not, I feel genuinely moved, swept away by the mood that the composer and his librettis...

BWW Review: Gershwin's PORGY & BESS Returns to the Met with a Grand Bess in Angel Blue
by Richard Sasanow - November 06, 2021

There are so many things to like about the season’s revival of Gershwin’s PORGY & BESS, which was new in the 2019-2020 season, before Covid became the “song” that no one wanted to hear. PORGY on the other hand, is the music that everybody can take a liking to, with its fluid combination of opera, ...

BWW Review: DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG at the Metropolitan Opera
by George Weinhouse - November 01, 2021

For the first time in almost seven years, the Metropolitan Opera has revived Wagner's DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NURNBERG.  Considered by many to be Wagner's masterpiece, today's matinee performance gave credence to that opinion.  The production is that of Otto Schenk with scenery by Gunther Schneider-Si...

BWW Review: My Desert Island (and 92nd St. Y) All-Time Dream Team – Brownlee, Spyres and Rossini
by Richard Sasanow - October 30, 2021

Oh, sure, give us Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly, Laura Kaminsky, Kevin Puts, Terence Blanchard, Paul Moravec, Huang Ruo and all the other fabulous composers at work today. But let’s talk about Rossini--and it’s hard for anyone who attended the concert the other night at New York’s 92nd Street Y not to. ...

BWW Review: The San Diego Opera Presents STEPHANIE BLYTHE IN RECITAL at the Balboa Theatre
by Ron Bierman - October 26, 2021

The imposing mezzo soprano Stephanie Blythe is known for her roles in Wagner, Verdi and Stravinsky. Why would she begin a Balboa Theatre recital for the San Diego Opera with Johnny Mercer’s 'Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive?” Here’s what she said in a recent interview, “I’ve been a great fan of Johnny ...