New York City’s rich opera and theatre scene is back in full swing after the long pandemic silence; Patrick Dillon explores its awakening.
Patrick Dillon
Opera Lafayette’s Silvain Artistic Director Ryan Brown “came through big-time in the pit”
I’d very much missed Opera Lafayette, whose annual visits to New York from its homebase in Washington DC had been highlights of my pre-Covid decade of opera-going. The company had its ups and its downs, but one thing was utterly consistent: its commitment to...
COSÌ FAN TUTTERihab Chaieb is “a dream” in Washington National Opera’s Così fan tutte
I’d thought I was arriving early for a three o’clock Sunday matinee—but no, in frustrating fact I was fifteen minutes late for a two o’clock curtain. Mea culpa, and my distinct loss: the 150 minutes that remained of Washington National Opera’s Così fan tutte (20...
Almost complete Don Carlos in French at the Met at last
Don Carlo, in Italian, not Don Carlos, in French—that’s how I, like nearly everyone who loves this noblest of operas, first made its acquaintance. This Schiller-inspired melding of romantic and political intrigues at the court of Spain’s Philip II remains my most...
Sondra Radvanovsky ‘blossoms’ in the Met’s Tosca
So much press hoopla has been lavished on the Met’s two new operas, Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones and Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice—Fire alone inspired four feature articles in The New York Times, not to mention an opinion column and an actual review—that...
Songs for Murdered Sisters: Eking Beauty out of Tragedy
In the midst of a brutal cold spell that left millions of Texans without power, heat, and water, Houston Grand Opera (HGO)—unsinkable survivor of Hurricane Harvey, which flooded its home, the Wortham Center, and closed it down for a year in 2017/18—streamed what’s...
Manon at the Met—a marvelous revival keeps Massenet fresh
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Laurent Pelly’s drab production of Massenet’s Manon will never be a favorite of mine (he’s got a far, far defter hand for comedy), but the performance I saw on Oct. 2nd—its third of the new Met season—managed to easily outshine its...
Review: Canadian divas Jane Archibald & Adrianne Pieczonka conquer Carnegie Hall
It must have been a simple coincidence that the English Concert’s semi-staged Rinaldo happened on Palm Sunday (Mar. 25), juxtaposing Christianity’s celebration of Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem with the First Crusaders’ “liberation” of that holy city,...