The Magic Flute and La Traviata, New York

The dust on 65th Street is clearing up and the reviews for the renovated Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts are in — the piazza is being hailed as newly “inviting” by architects and arts critics alike, and rightly so.

Tosca, Metropolitan Opera

They have been fiddling with Luc Bondy’s staging of Tosca. Scarpia doesn’t masturbate on the Madonna; he just sort of pinches her erotically.

The Art of the Countertenor

Since he first came to notice a few years ago — in Messiah in this very hall, as Creonte at Covent Garden, and as Arsace in Partenope at New York City Opera, to name by a few recently acclaimed performances — many a starry accolade has been heaped upon young Welsh countertenor, Iestyn Davies: “achingly beautiful tone”,“unforgettable focus and poignancy” and “compelling sense of rhetoric” are typical of the bountiful superlatives.

Ghost Opera & A Chinese Home

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/ghost-opera–a-chinese-home-20110113-19pwy.html

Carmen, I’ve cracked you

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jan/12/daniel-kramer-carmen

Taking Gilbert & Sullivan Seriously

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703779704576073913819798464.html

Simon Boccanegra, Bologna 2007

This beautifully realized production of Verdi’s somber masterpiece of political intrigue and father/daughter reconciliation could be a complete success except for one missing element — memorable singing.

Il barbiere di Siviglia in Montpellier

There is more than one way to skin a cat.

NY Phil/AdËs/Hampson, Avery Fisher Hall, New York

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/6d922412-1cdf-11e0-8c86-00144feab49a.html#axzz1B32F4Jxp

King Roger at Bregenz Festival 2009

Long-dormant operas sometimes rise to meet a new dawn only to then slink away like the creatures of the night they were doomed to be — seductive but dangerous to approach.