Category: Performances

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.

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

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.

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, 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.

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.

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

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.

There is no middle ground in War and Peace ó or, rather, itís all middle ground, like a battlefield, and you may feel as if every soldier in Russia (and in France) has marched over you.

Once upon a time, we used to only dream about a stellar pairing like Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu has fielded for their current offering on display: “La Cenerentola.”