The New York Times critic W. J. Henderson, back in 1897, punningly dubbed The Metropolitan Opera the “Faustspielhaus,” so dominant was Charles Gounod’s chef d’oeuvre in the company’s repertory. But another opera of Gounod’s, Roméo et Juliette, didn’t lag far...
“I’m Old Fashioned”—that lilting Jerome Kern standard popped unbidden into my head as Florencia en el Amazonas unfolded at the Metropolitan Opera. Its title sang to me with two distinct “I”s: there was, on the one hand, Daniel Catán’s unfashionably old-fashioned...
Dead Man Walking, the opera, has enjoyed a remarkable life: it’s been around for twenty-three years now, performed in dozens of venues worldwide and commercially recorded twice, and it shows no signs of going away. I first encountered it in 2002, in Cincinnati, caught...
What is it about Schubert song cycles that attracts the Regie gang? In recent years Christof Loy, William Kentridge, and David Alden have all had a go at Winterreise, whose coherent narrative plausibly invites theatrical treatment. Now Claus Guth has tackled...
Few operas can have enjoyed a splashier premiere than Francesca Caccini’s Alcina. In the Florence of February 1625, the Medici court gathered at the grand villa of Maria Magdalena, widow of Grand Duke Cosimo II, to welcome the visiting Prince Wladyslaw of Poland, to...
![<sub>Boston Early Music Festival <em>Circé</em></sub> “no one knows the nuances of French baroque style better than [Karina Gauvin] does.”](https://operacanada.ca/wp-content/smush-webp/2023/06/2023-06-03-Circe-dress_8-1.jpg.webp)
“Wort oder Ton?”: which has the upper hand, the words or the music? That centuries-old debate, as immortalized in Richard Strauss’s Capriccio, popped into my head in the midst of the Boston Early Music Festival’s Circé (11 June), a tragédie en musique first performed...
How often does an opera audience seem united by one big, heady communal high? That was the feeling at The Metropolitan Opera’s new Die Zauberflöte on May 22, a giddily joyous experience that sent me home in buoyant spirits. Simon McBurney’s tirelessly inventive,...
There’s a fistful of good reasons for seeing Champion. There’s the story, a real and strong one: the life of the sexually conflicted prizefighter Emile Griffith, haunted by his accidental killing of another boxer in the ring. There’s James Robinson’s direction, clear...
In his not-quite-fourteen years at The Metropolitan Opera, that compact bundle of music-directorial energy known as Yannick Nézet-Séguin has taken his measured time with Puccini: a decade passed before his first Turandot, in October 2019, and another two years elapsed...
![<sub>Metropolitan Opera <em>Falstaff</em></sub> “Everything about [Rustioni’s] deft, graceful, shipshape account of this infinitely rewarding score seemed unobtrusively right”](https://operacanada.ca/wp-content/smush-webp/2023/03/Fals_1435_C.jpg.webp)
Since its unveiling at London’s Royal Opera in 2012, Robert Carsen’s temporal transplant of Verdi’s Falstaff from the latter years of one Queen Elizabeth’s reign to the early years of another’s has delighted audiences in New York (2013), Amsterdam and Toronto (2014),...
I didn’t much care for his Parsifal, and I liked his Flying Dutchman even less, but at the first intermission of Canadian François Girard’s new Metropolitan Opera Lohengrin (2 March) I had high hopes for its success. Tim Yip’s set was striking—what looked to be some...
Is Kevin Puts’s The Hours the best brand-new opera the Metropolitan Opera has presented in years? Probably. It’s meticulously crafted, eminently singable, and makes for an eclectically influenced but almost consistently alluring listen. “Based on the book by Michael...