Ken Howard News

Puccini’s passionate love story La Rondine will make a rare Met appearance. Learn how to purchase tickets!

Seattle Opera has unveiled its 2024/25 season. Learn about the productions and see how to purchase tickets!

Sometimes you hear a singer who embodies a role so completely that it’s hard to imagine her in anything else. That’s how I felt about the wonderful mezzo Aigul Akhmetshina, who’s singing the title role in the Met’s new production of Bizet’s CARMEN, which I saw at its second performance. Her portrayal was as full-bodied as her voice and she sizzled, filling up the stage as much as one can imagine. It’s little surprise that she’s considered the Carmen of the moment, having appeared in seven other productions (with two to come).

Puccini’s Madama Butterfly will return to the Met stage for 16 performances, starting January 11.

Get a first look at The Met Opera's highly anticipated new production of Carmen. For the winter run of performances through January 27, young mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina stars in the complex and volatile title role.

What did critics think of The Met's new production of Carmen? In her highly anticipated Met debut, Cracknell reinvigorates the classic story of deadly passion with a staging that moves the action to modern day and explores themes that could not be more relevant today: gendered violence, abusive labor structures, and the desire to break through societal boundaries.

Don't miss the live transmission of Daniel Catán's 1996 opera Florencia en el Amazonas, the first Spanish-language opera at the Met in nearly a century. Join in for this historic cultural and artistic moment as a majority Latinx cast brings this magical realism-inspired production to life.

Just as the Met’s debut of Mexican composer Daniel Catan’s FLORENCIA EN EL AMAZONAS (FLORENCE IN THE AMAZON) began the other day, a member of the audience yelled out “Viva la ópera en español!” (“Long live opera in Spanish!”). And that was before a single note of the composer’s lyric, highly accessible and heavy-on-the-Puccini score was played.

Now being performed at the Kauffman Center and concluding this weekend is a wonderful rendition by the Lyric Opera of Kansas City of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s final composition together, “The Sound of Music”  This production is as good as it gets. Framed by massive settings by Peter J. Davison and glorious costumes by Alex Valasek, “Sound of Music” is the incredible, mostly true tale of the Von Trapp family singers and their escape from the Nazis taken from the Matriarch Maria Von Trapp’s 1949 memoir.

One of the troubles of being a major institution like the Met is that when they produce a new production of a major opera--and Verdi’s UN BALLO IN MASCHERA, which opened in revival the other night, certainly falls into that category--it’s an expensive undertaking. It's true that sometimes a production can be pulled out of its death tumble, with a new cast or simply time making the absolutely awful suddenly make sense. In the case of the current run of the opera, with Angela Meade, Charles Castronovo and Quinn Kelsey heading the cast, even good and sometimes inspired singing can’t save the day. Alden’s take is simply too laden with concept for it to breathe.

Lyric season opens with a double does of opera vérité

Thomas Guggeis, the young German conductor making his Met debut, is Kapellmeister at the Staatsoper Berlin and the designated Generalmusikdirektor of the Oper Frankfurt; pretty impressive for one who has yet to hit his 30th birthday!   His Met debut was justly anticipated, as across Europe he is known as something of a Wagner and Strauss specialist.   His performance was well-paced and well-colored and energetic.  The score provides for enormous surges of energy and power, and the orchestra was certainly up to the task, but Guggeis’ rendition while quite good, was perhaps a tad lacking in thrills – the magnificent Wagner bombast was a little timid and the quieter passages were lovely but just a bit bland.   With time and more experience with this orchestra, one can safely expect some exceptional performances in the future.

There are no supernatural women arriving on horseback to escort slain warriors to the afterlife--just a trio of mermaids, a couple of giants and a loveless dwarf, along with a bunch of gods, demi-gods and grotesque humans in Richard Wagner’s DAS RHEINGOLD, the first part of the composer’s Ring cycle (officially DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN). Saturday night’s audience stayed to cheer the opening of General and Artistic Director Tomer Zvulun’s production after nearly three intermission-less hours.

Following its Metropolitan Opera premiere on April 10th, Terence Blanchard's opera Champion, based on the true story of the troubled former middleweight boxing champion Emile Griffith, continues with nine performances running through May 13.

In search of new audiences, the Met has followed Terence Blanchard’s FIRE SHUT UP IN MY BONES with the jazz musician/composer’s first opera, CHAMPION, the story of closeted boxer Emile Griffith’s rise and fall from grace. Honestly, never have I heard people whose usual venues are Madison Square Garden, Yankee Stadium and Monday Night Football on ESPN talk about how they “wanted to see the new opera at the Met.”

It took Richard Strauss only about 100 minutes apiece (with no breaks) to tell the lurid tale of SALOME and the tragedy of ELEKTRA. So why on earth did he and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal need almost five hours (including two intermissions) to tell the personal stories of an “aging” (she was really in her 30s) noblewoman, a couple of teenagers in love and a repulsive sexual predator?

Sypher Studios have announced its upcoming documentary, War Unfolding, narrated by four-time Oscar nominee Annette Bening and featuring an all-star cast including Eliza Bennett, Rachel Bloom, Gary Cole, Abigail Cowen, Oscar-winner Laura Dern, Monique Edwards, SAG Award winner Michael C. Hall, SAG Award winner Kelvin Harrison Jr., Golden Globe winner Paul Walter Hauser, Thurn Hoffman, Richard T. Jones, Jay Lee, Erick Lopez, Sandra Seacat, Oscar-winner Wes Studi, DeWanda Wise, and others.

Soprano Angel Blue’s Violetta didn’t seem as tragic as we’re used to seeing in Verdi’s masterwork and maybe that's right. She’s lived life on her own terms and if she’s dying of tuberculosis, well, c’est la vie. (After all, the source of the piece is French: the Alexandre Dumas fils “La Dame aux Camellias”).

After her highly acclaimed performances as Fedora earlier this month, soprano Sonya Yoncheva will return on February 28 for her Met role debut as the fearless title priestess of Bellini’s scorching bel canto drama Norma. 

Musicologist Joseph Kerman is probably most widely remembered for calling Puccini’s TOSCA “a shabby little shocker.” I wonder whether he’d have something similar to say about Giordano’s FEDORA, which brought the Met audience to its feet on New Year’s Eve?