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Featured stories
Strength, Power & Kindness
Mezzo Jamie Barton brings her unique gifts to a new Jake Heggie opera at Houston Grand Opera.
Sight Lines | Peter Sellars
F. Paul Driscoll chats with the legendary opera and theater director.
Breaking news
Renata Scotto, 89, Star Soprano Who Seamlessly Merged Singing and Acting, has Died
The Metropolitan Opera Guild to Streamline Its Operations
Graham Clark, 81, Tenor With a Rare Gift for Characterization, has Died
Natural Growth
San Francisco Conservatory is changing the classical-music landscape.
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Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival
Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival
"Augmented reality reached the Bayreuth Festival this season. The festival originally planned to supply the entire audience for Jay Scheib’s new staging of Parsifal with specially designed glasses to experience the production’s three-dimensional moving images. Instead only 300 ticket holders received the glasses for each show. While Scheib offered a modern, well-thought-out reading of Parsifal’s text and music, the nonstop barrage of images threatened to turn the innovative aspects of this Parsifal into visual Muzak."
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La Cenerentola at Opera Maine
La Cenerentola at Opera Maine
"Opera Maine’s Cenerentola delivered an evening of boisterous laughs and thrilling vocalism, and, in the role of Angelina, Hongni Wu met all the coloratura challenges set by Rossini, singing with an elegance and emotive beauty that transformed even simple phrases into meaningful sentiments."
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Madama Butterfly at Cincinnati Opera
Madama Butterfly at Cincinnati Opera
"Directed by Matthew Ozawa, Cincinnati Opera's powerful thought-provoking new production of Madama Butterfly is an extraordinary re-envisioning of the opera, a subtle critique that does no violence to the work but focuses attention on what is already there. The revelatory production—created jointly with the Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Utah Opera Companies—certainly deserves wide exposure."
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Henri VIII at Bard SummerScape
Henri VIII at Bard SummerScape
"There are more viscerally exciting historical operas inspired by Tudor dynastic history, but Henri VIII is worth hearing: its ensemble scenes and processions are well constructed and divertingly energetic in the mode of Spontini and Meyerbeer. Leon Botstein—who led a 2012 concert of the opera—fared solidly in the pit and Jean-Romain Vesperini's fully staged production rendered the occasionally melodramatic action comprehensible, and was quite handsome to see."
A Sense of Tradition
Jakub Hrůša, Covent Garden’s Music Director Designate, leads Jenůfa in Chicago this season.
Sound Bites:
Matthew Cairns
A tenor from Ontario sings Wagner at the Met this season.
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OFFENBACH: La Vie Parisienne
OFFENBACH: La Vie Parisienne
“This five-act, three-hour version for completists drags on and on; there’s an excess of heavy-handed dialogue delivery and an abundance of mugging.”
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Karim Sulayman: Broken Branches
Karim Sulayman: Broken Branches
“At its core, this is an album by two Western classical musicians of Asian descent attempting to navigate their intersecting ethnic and sonic identities.”
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Rachel Willis-Sørensen: Four Last Songs
Rachel Willis-Sørensen: Four Last Songs
“Willis-Sørensen’s voice responds keenly to Strauss’s vocal writing. The top is its glory.”
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Kitty Whately: Befreit: A Soul Surrendered
Kitty Whately: Befreit: A Soul Surrendered
Songs by Müller-Hermann, Mahler, Strauss and Schweikert. Middleton, piano. Texts and translations. Chandos CHAN 20177
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Sight Lines | Missy Mazzoli
Sight Lines | Missy Mazzoli
The composer speaks about how she learned to write for the voice, her efforts to foster greater inclusion among future composers and her chamber opera, Proving Up, which receives performances at Juilliard in February.
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Sight Lines | Russell Thomas
Sight Lines | Russell Thomas
F. Paul Driscoll speaks with tenor Russell Thomas about his new appointment as LA Opera's artist-in-residence, how he finds inspiration in old recordings, and the repertoire that he hopes to take on during the next phase of his career.
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Best of the Best: Eugene Onegin
Best of the Best: Eugene Onegin
Our favorite selections from Tchaikovsky's great romance, sung by an all-star cast, from Ivan Kozlovsky, Leonid Sobinov, Jussi Björling and Galina Vishnevskaya to Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Peter Mattei and Renée Fleming.
Sound Play
American bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee, who this season sings the Dutchman in Santa Fe, has emerged as a Wagnerian to watch—and hear.
