Québécois director François Girard probably seemed an obvious choice to design the Met’s new Lohengrin. His recent opera stagings are as celebrated as his music-obsessed movies, including the classic Thirty-two…
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).
Tannhäuser at the Boston Symphony Orchestra
The Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) has a long tradition of superb concert and semi-staged opera, most recently under conductors like Seiji Ozawa, Colin Davis and Bernhard Haitink, as well as…
Lohengrin at Bayerische Staatsoper
Pity the modern European stage director confronted with Lohengrin. The music is famously seductive, but the plot is abhorrent. What is one to make of a saint who arrives on…
Elektra at Washington National Opera
Of standard repertoire operas, Richard Strauss’s Elektra may be the toughest to perform. It requires a gargantuan orchestra of extreme virtuosity, a conductor who can mold 100 minutes of increasing…
Operatic Shock Treatment: Salomé in Paris
A new production of Richard Strauss’s Salomé is playing at Paris’s Opera Bastille. Stage Director Lydia Steier, an American working mostly in Germany, has designed it to shock audiences. In…
Tristan und Isolde at Seattle
Seattle Opera has long championed the operas of Richard Wagner. Legendary impresarios Glynn Ross and Speight Jenkins – the latter, at 85, still cutting a dapper figure in the audience…
Idomeneo at the Met
Thursday night performances of lesser-known works often spark memorable Met moments. So it was last week, at the revival of Mozart’s Idomeneo. The house was far from full and a…
Otello at Philadelphia
Gioachino Rossini finished Otello in 1816, the same year as his comic masterpieces, Il barbiere di Siviglia and La Cenerentola. The latter two are acknowledged masterpieces. Yet it is Otello…
Hamlet at the Met
Today, with post-romanticism and minimalism in decline, most new operas fall into one of two categories. They are either “popularist” or “modernist.” Populist operas are crossover works. Building on Gershwin’s…
Ariadne auf Naxos at the Met
A funny thing happened at the Metropolitan Opera last Thursday, during the final performance of a recent run of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. In the silence after the applause…