LAST WORD REVIEW: Candide @ New York City Opera
Sunday afternoon, The New York City Opera unofficially bid farewell to its landmark Harold Prince production of the invaluable Leonard Bernstein operetta, Candide. It took Mr. Prince’s production, begun at the Chelsea Theater in 1973 and later brought to the New York City Opera by Beverly Sills [...]
The Times is reporting that The Met has ended its unofficial policy of giving Ringtards (or Ringnuts or Ringheads or whatever you want to call the mass of fanatics who roam the world in search of the latest iteration of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle) priority access to future productions of the operatic tetralogy.
Needless to say, peeps [...]
Opera Review: “Tristan und Isolde” @ The Met
The Met’s latest mounting of Dieter Dorn’s 1999 production of “Tristan und Isolde,” Wagner’s insanely genius love-death opera retelling an ancient Celtic myth of star-crossed lovers via some of the most gorgeous—and I mean gorgeous—music ever written for the theater, has met an unusually gratuitous series of challenges [...]
The road to erotic transcendence is a slippery slope.
C.C.’s reporting at 1:31AM because girl just got back from The Met’s rockin’-n-rollin’ production of “Tristan und Isolde”–which has already been beleaguered by a series of casting issues–and yet another stroke of bad luck befell the love-sick opera.
Just into the third act, what was meant to be [...]
C.C. came across this poster this morning in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, just of Myrtle Avenue (aka, Murder Avenue). It’s an advertisement for The Met’s upcoming staging of Philip Glass’s opera “Satyagraha,” based on the early life of Gandhi (opens April 11).
This kind of confirms our theory that Peter Gelb has a large part of his [...]
Tuesday night, General Manager-to-be of the New York City Opera, Gerard Mortier, gave a talk entitled “The Enchantment of The Opera” at the J. P. Morgan Library in Manhattan. The lecture was by no means an announcement of his first full season of opera programming, which will be in 2009-2010, and is said to include [...]
Dance Review: Mark Morris’s “King Arthur” @ New York City Opera
(Photos by Carol Rosegg)
The City Opera has returned from a two-month hiatus with a production to be proud of. Mark Morris’s “King Arthur” (2006), an abstract (and abstracted) opera/dance based on the 17th century collaboration between poet John Dryden and composer Henry Purcell, satisfies as [...]
Yesterday, Executive Director Peter Gelb led a press conference at The Metropolitan Opera, announcing the company’s 2008-2009 season which also marks its 125th year anniversary. Six large images from the season’s new productions loomed above a little table; large, glossy, sexy. If Peter Gelb hasn’t been clear enough about his goals to update the institution [...]
Opera Review: “Peter Grimes” @ The Met
(Photos by Ken Howard)
Like its central character, Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” occupies a precarious place in the social consciousness. With its attractive score and mysteriously dark story, the opera evokes the same kind of scrutiny the ambiguously sinister yet psychologically compelling Grimes attracts from the local townspeople; folks don’t [...]
Opera Review: Lorin Maazel’s “Die Walküre” at The Met
If you studied music, watching a Wagner opera is a bit like standing outside a movie premier: you crane your neck in anticipation of the celebrities you know will be strutting down the red carpet. In the case of Die Walküre, which wraps up its well-praised run [...]
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