Sometimes, the Metropolitan Opera seems like an endless Puccini festival. It's particularly apparent this season, when top dogs LA BOHEME, TOSCA and MADAMA BUTTERFLY are joined by TURANDOT a…
It seems ironic--to me at least--that New York's venerable City Opera would be returning to life at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Theater, just as the "Prototype: Opera/Theatre/Now" festival…
One more BOHEME? Yet another TOSCA? How about BARBIERE redux? Sometimes the standard repertoire of opera companies seems too standard. That's why it was good to hear that the Met was mountin…
No more carping about out-of-tune singing (for the rest of 2015). No more bemoaning directors who don't seem to like the art of opera (for the next five minutes). No more worrying whether tr…
On paper, Vivaldi's 1737 opera seria CATONE IN UTICA seems a big mess: The music from the first act is missing and musicologists can't agree what the third act should look and sound like, le…
The Met's production of Verdi's great opera RIGOLETTO, is often referred to as the 'Ratpack' version--because it is set in the Las Vegas days of Frank Sinatra and his high-living cronies. Fr…
Who or what is Lulu, the eponymous character in Alban Berg's landmark atonal opera? Is she saint or sinner? Femme fatale or victim? Put-upon or mistress of her own fate? Whatever else she mi…
The Richard Tucker Music Foundation's annual galas--celebrating each year's winner of the Tucker Award to young American singers--are known for two things. First, they are notoriously fun ev…
Almost 40 years ago, on short notice, the great tenor Jon Vickers (who died this summer at 90) caused a scandal when he pulled out of the premiere of the Met's still-current production of Wa…
The Met came late to the trio of Donizetti operas about British queens, when it finally mounted ANNA BOLENA mounted for Anna Netrebko in 2011. This was long after Beverly Sills made her deal…
Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky hadn't even opened his mouth, as the Count di Luna, when the audience went wild at the season's premiere of Verdi's IL TROVATORE. It was as if he had jus…
With the season's first performance of Donizetti's ANNA BOLENA on Saturday at the Met, the big news is that it's part one of soprano Sondra Radvanofsky's first Tudor Trilogy in New York. Alo…
When I heard mezzo Jamie Barton at the Metropolitan Opera's recital in Central Park in the summer of 2014, she would have knocked my socks off--if I hadn't been wearing sandals. This time ar…
At a time when we're often inundated with yet another TOSCA, BOHEME or CARMEN at major opera houses, the Caramoor Festival in Katonah, NY--a couple of hours north of New York City in summer …
The Met was running on all cylinders for the last performance of the season, with Verdi's UN BALLO IN MASCHERA in an energized version of the production that premiered in 2012. The trio of p…
It was "out with the old, in with the new" for another of the Franco Zeffirelli productions that were once the Metropolitan Opera's bread and butter, designed for audiences to cheer for the …
Stephanie Blythe--who's at the Met these days singing Baba the Turk in Stravinsky's THE RAKE'S PROGRESS--"abhors labels." That's why, despite a cavernous voice that has become even deeper wi…
What a great idea it was for the Met to mount revivals of Verdi's ERNANI and DON CARLO at the same time! It offers an opportunity to compare two operas that have much in common--and a produc…
Nine years before IL TROVATORE took the prize for Verdi's most outlandish story line with gypsies, stolen babies and mistaken identities there was ERNANI, with a different kind of complicate…
I consider Mozart's DON GIOVANNI at the top of my list of favorite operas--the music starts to go through my head without much encouragement and gets stuck there. Yet, it's also one of the m…
Donizetti's MARIA STUARDA is a chamber piece blown up to grand opera proportions. That was the takeaway from the new production--that centers on a fictional battle royal between Elizabeth I …
With all its money problems, why hasn't the Met thought about doing some lesser known works in concert? Or, for that matter, marshalled some of its glamorous resources to put on the Verdi RE…
Once upon a time, the Met used to be able to pull off an operetta, like the Rudolf Bing-era FLEDERMAUS. But for the second year in a row--after last season's dire FLEDERMAUS from writer Doug…
For New York opera-goers, what was the event of the year? Undoubtedly, John Adams's THE DEATH OF KLINGHOFER, not only for the kerfuffle caused by the [unfounded] claims of anti-Semitism but …
Only someone who arrived convinced of the opera's bias could have found the Met's premiere of the John Adams-Alice Goodman THE DEATH OF KLINGHOFFER to be anti-Semitic. On the other hand, tha…