“I’m Old Fashioned”—that lilting Jerome Kern standard popped unbidden into my head as Florencia en...
Patrick Dillon
Metropolitan Opera
The Metropolitan Opera
Dead Man Walking “Jake Heggie, I hope, was feeling justifiably proud”
Dead Man Walking, the opera, has enjoyed a remarkable life: it’s been around for twenty-three...
Park Avenue Armory
Doppelganger featured “Michael Levine’s typically spare and striking design”
What is it about Schubert song cycles that attracts the Regie gang? In recent years Christof Loy,...
Boston Early Music Festival
Caccini Alcina “It could well have been written for Mireille Lebel”
Few operas can have enjoyed a splashier premiere than Francesca Caccini’s Alcina. In the Florence...
Boston Early Music Festival Circé “no one knows the nuances of French baroque style better than [Karina Gauvin] does.”
“Wort oder Ton?”: which has the upper hand, the words or the music? That centuries-old debate, as...
Metropolitan Opera Die Zauberflöte “Musically, this Flute was top-flight”
How often does an opera audience seem united by one big, heady communal high? That was the feeling...
The Metropolitan Opera Champion “There wasn’t a weak performance onstage”
There’s a fistful of good reasons for seeing Champion. There’s the story, a real and strong one:...
The Metropolitan Opera La bohème Nézet-Séguin “was greeted with the evening’s heartiest cheers”
In his not-quite-fourteen years at The Metropolitan Opera, that compact bundle of...
Metropolitan Opera Falstaff “Everything about [Rustioni’s] deft, graceful, shipshape account of this infinitely rewarding score seemed unobtrusively right”
Since its unveiling at London’s Royal Opera in 2012, Robert Carsen’s temporal transplant of...
Metropolitan Opera Lohengrin “musically this was indeed a classy show”
I didn’t much care for his Parsifal, and I liked his Flying Dutchman even less, but at the first...