Awesome Angelika Again

While I eagerly seized upon an opportunity to hear Angelika Kirschlager live for the first time, having written in very recent weeks about not one but two of the star mezzo’s current CD releases, I ventured to Frankfurt’s Alte Oper feeling a little bit like her stalker.

Karita Mattila Performs Manon Lescaut

When I worked in the Archives of the Met, I was custodian of several hundred costumes, many from the days when divas traveled with steamer trunks full of things run up just for them, by the finest designers, with the most glamorous materials, in the colors and styles that suited the ladies themselves.

Verdi’s Falstaff at Chicago

There is nothing redeeming about Sir John Falstaff, one of Shakespeareís most lively comic characters and the subject of Verdiís final opera, and yet, inexplicably, we love him.

Two Queens in Full Cry

What constitutes an “international opera star” these days, anyway?

Die Walk¸re at the Met

The Metropolitan Opera audience loves its Wagner, and the management for the last several decades has, alas, made sure we arenít spoiled: itís a rare season that gets more than two production revivals of Wagner, and some years there have been none.

Deborah Voigt in Concert with the San Francisco Symphony

With her performance of the ìFour Last Songs,î ably partnered by Michael Tilson Thomas and his San Francisco Symphony, Deborah Voigt emphatically confirmed her place as one of the glories of the current roster of Strauss interpreters.

John Adams’ Doctor Atomic in Chicago

John Adams, whose opera Nixon in China set the bar for post-minimalism in the lyric theatre, has once again scored a success with his latest work.

A New Hansel und Gretel at the Met

Wagnerís all-conquering chic made apocalyptic music-dramas drawn from folklore the ideal of the nationalistic era; every serious opera composer of the time felt obliged to attempt something in that line.

Oppenheimer opera charts new course in music

In this country art and politics are rarely bedfellows — strange or otherwise; indeed, it’s seldom that the two meet under the same roof.

IphigÈnie en Tauride at the Met

Regarded, until the modern vogue for earlier masters, as the senior surviving grand master of opera, Gluck never quite becomes fashionable and never quite vanishes.