Shortly before the Metropolitan Opera opened its new production of Così fan tutte, the battle between the company and its disgraced former demigod reached a second-act climax. The Met…
Last fall, the strands of singer Rhiannon Giddens's life and the hybrid tapestry of American music wound together in one evening-long whirl. At 5 p.m. she joined Eric Church to sing the coun…
The idea of turning Oscar Wilde's meringue-like comedy The Importance of Being Earnest into an opera is the sort of thunderclap that comes to you late at night over a bottle of bourbon and t…
The Metropolitan Opera has been James Levine's house for so long that it's hard to know which group is smaller: those who remember the Met before Jimmy, or those who can imagine it without h…
A skeletal statue with a nasty-looking scythe presides over an opera that begins with a capital crime and ends with an execution. From the opening ax-chop chords and doleful answer in the ov…
The beauty of certain sturdy operas is that they can survive just about any directorial manhandling if the singing is good enough. The Met's new production of Manon Lescaut, directed by Rich…
This a banner year for Donizetti at the Metropolitan Opera, propelled by soprano Sondra Radvanovsky's ambition to perform all three of his Tudor queens (Anne Boleyn; Mary, Queen of Scots; an…
Maybe I shouldn't make too much of this, but New York City Opera is attempting to resurrect itself with an opera about a botched resurrection. NYCO Renaissance, an entity created by the hedg…
The opera Dog Days opens with a family, "not unlike your own, sit[ting] in a house, watching a TV that isn't on." Now, I don't know your family " mine does not include two perpetually stoned…
At a time when college campuses are roiled by fights over insensitive Halloween costumes, ersatz sushi, and the cultural plunder of yoga, it's almost a relief to come across an example of ho…
If the Metropolitan Opera decided to concentrate its entire mission into a single night, that show might look a lot William Kentridge's production of Lulu. Berg's 80-year-old opera is both a…
Three years after its world premiere, George Benjamin's Written on Skin has already tattooed itself indelibly onto the story of opera. In a saner world, a piece this good would make its Amer…
Against physical odds, Steven Blier coaches deep emotions from New York's greatest singers.
Having hauled The Rake's Progress out of deep storage, the Metropolitan Opera is doing the showbiz equivalent of blinding your math teacher by bouncing sunlight off a watch face. A few quick…
Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, that classic diptych of tuneful weepies, has returned to the Metropolitan Opera in a lopsided new production. One piece is black-…
Let's stipulate that there is no rational reason for two sumo wrestlers the size of young hippos to collide center stage during a Handel opera. Let's further acknowledge that Semele, an 18th…
Joyce DiDonato belongs to that elite club of performing artists who get ovations simply for stepping onstage, before they've even uttered a sound. Then she proceeds to earn the applause. Wit…
Alan Gilbert will step down as music director of the New York Philharmonic when his contract expires in 2017, leaving the orchestra to navigate a turbulent patch that is likely to last for s…
It takes so long for the Metropolitan Opera's new production of The Merry Widow to warm up that it barely reaches the temperature of day-old bathwater before the final dose of foam. How…
Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg lingers on the moment when one era rolls into the next, when nostalgia is vaporized by innovation, decorum trumped by joy. It's an opera about a …
Does the Metropolitan Opera not know when it has a winner? Graham Vick's 1994 production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, one of the 20th century's greatest operas, has spent the past 20 years in…
Can you measure the vigor of an art form by its ability to stir up loathing? Last night's Metropolitan Opera premiere of John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer suggested that audiences still …
Observed from afar, the opera world looks like a strange, turbulent planet populated by tantrum-throwing, bouquet-catching, window-shattering creatures called divas. Zoom in closer, though, …
Will an opera about terrorists ever not be timely? Can The Death of Klinghoffer ever stop incandescing? John Adams's work had its premiere in 1991, when the events it was based on"the 1985 h…
The Met's labor crisis is over; the spiritual crisis goes on. There's a lot to be thankful for in the way contract negotiations unfolded. All through a treacherous summer, rehearsals never s…