Category: Performances

Lieder and opera are different worlds. But understanding the differences helps us appreciate what makes each form distinct. Hugo Wolf’s songs come close to bridging the genres. They’ve been described as “miniature operas” where dramas are distilled into compact form.

Bringing Andrei Şerban’s Turandot to the Washington National Opera as a season finale really means finishing the year with a bang.

You won’t get much argument nowadays — you won’t get any from me — if you call Handel’s dramatic oratorios operas in all but name.

L’elisir d’amore is perhaps Donizetti’s silliest opera — but also one of his most charming.

In David Alden’s extraordinary new staging of Britten’s
masterpiece, with sets by Paul Steinberg, the Borough is populated by stylised
grotesques, a clever twist on the opera’s existing ‘Little
England’ character stereotypes.

The Scottish Play’s ability to conduit bad luck is apparently not limited to the spoken stage, witness the new Paris OpÈra production of Verdi’s Macbeth.

It’s the Ring — not just an ordinary evening (or four evenings) of opera — indeed, if you accept its creator’s words on the matter, it’s a music-drama, not an opera at all.

How often does one experience an opera in which everything works — in which there is not one flaw either in the staging or in its musical dimensions?

As far as world premieres go, Houston Grand Opera is in elite company in the United States, having performed thirty-eight new works prior to opening night of AndrÈ Previn’s new opera Brief Encounter.

By sheer coincidence, the Academy of Santa Cecilia — one of the most authoritative symphonic orchestras in Europe — planned a rather unusual concert in the same days (May 3-7) when just in the very same auditorium there was the world premiËre of a movie expected to be a Hollywood blockbuster — the thriller titled “Angels & Demons”.