The Ancient Theater of Epidaurus is the world’s largest non-amplified performance space, seating 14,000 spectators. Each summer the Athens and Epidaurus Festival, almost exclusively devoted to ancient Greek drama, attracts…
Author: Andrew Moravcsik
Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Princeton University. Also appointments at Technical University of Munich (Germany) and European University Institute (Italy).
Soprano Sondra Radvonovsky at the Princeton Festival
The Princeton Festival has recently emerged as a satisfying summer destination for opera lovers in the broader New York area. It presents one major opera annually and also a concert…
Milan on the Euphrates: Verdi’s Nabucodonosor at Teatro alla Scala
Riccardo Chailly’s tenure as Music Director of Teatro alla Scala is ending. Myung-Whun Chung will take over later this year. Over the past decade, Chailly has conducted one Verdi opera…
Traditional Virtues: Andrea Chénier at OperaDelaware
During the French Revolution, a secret police chief arrests a politically radical artist in order to extort sex from his glamorous girlfriend. Puccini’s Tosca? Nope, Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chénier. Puccini’s…
Barber’s Vanessa Comes to Boston
Samuel Barber’s first opera, Vanessa, premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1958 – when serialist abstraction and stark realism dominated the world of modern opera. Many critics immediately dismissed it…
Back to the Future: Verdi’s Macbeth at Teatro Nuovo
Big American opera companies in America today resemble Broadway companies. They strive to fill gargantuan theaters by serving up a mix of warhorses and crossover repertoire, staged by celebrity directors,…
Weill’s Der Protagonist in Venice
The recent run of Kurt Weill’s Der Protagonist at Venice’s Teatro Malibran offered a welcome opportunity to hear a great composer’s first and unjustly neglected opera. While its premiere in…
The Ghosts of Hamlet
William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is all about its melancholic title character. Yet the Danish Prince’s eloquence seduces most of us to overlook the play’s melodramatic plot: a murdered king, usurping brother,…
A Tale of Two Fidelios
At the Metropolitan Opera, performances of the same opera with the same singers just a few days apart often sound very different. During the recent run of Fidelio, for example,…
L’Amant Anonyme in Philadelphia
Among classical composers, Joseph Bologne’s biography is unique. Born in 1745 in the French Caribbean colony of Guadeloupe as the illegitimate son of a wealthy planter and a 19-year-old creole…