From a monologue on death to a story about a police shootout, Opera Philadelphia’s productions showed us the many things opera can be.
Tag: Opera
The Operatic Impulses of Maurice Sendak
The famed children’s book author and artist considered the theater his “second career.” An evening talk and live performance will explore his font of creativity.
A Political Opera With Big Ambitions Feels Off-Key
Despite a gorgeous, impressively conducted score, David Lang’s prisoner of the state felt overstuffed, unsatisfying, and contradictory.
Everyone Falls for Everyone in This Operatic Romp Based on Shakespeare
Rather than sticking to a literalistic depiction of the woods of Fairyland, Robert Carsen sets his adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a more symbolic land of beds.
Mini-Operas Inspired by Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party”
The canonical work of feminist art served as inspiration for 11 mini-operas written, composed, developed, and designed by NYU students.
The Somber Fate of a Manuscript Illuminator
In Written on Skin, currently playing at Opera Philadelphia, an illuminated manuscript artist gets involved with his patron’s wife.
A Surrealist Satire by Luis Buñuel Becomes a Grim Opera
The Metropolitan Opera’s lone contemporary production this season is an adaptation of Buñuel’s 1962 film about the Spanish aristocracy, The Exterminating Angel.
A New Opera Tells the Story of a Paleoart Pioneer Through His Granddaughter’s Eyes
On Site Opera’s Rhoda and the Fossil Hunt in the dinosaur hall of the American Museum of Natural History explores the paleoart of Charles Knight.
An Opera Revisits the Grisly Public Dissections of the 18th Century
An anatomical theater and its dissected murderess are the subjects of a bloody opera on the physical nature of evil.
A Scintillating Opera Is the Met’s First by a Female Composer in 113 Years
L’Amour de Loin, by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, receives a dazzling production that sets the self-aware tale of unrequited love on a flickering sea of LED lights.
In a New Staging of the Tale of William Tell, the Only Flaw Is the Audience
Musically and visually, the Metropolitan Opera’s first staging of Gioachino Rossini’s Guillaume Tell in over 80 years is a tremendous success.
An Operatic Lament for the Lonely Artist
“When we meet the very best, we have to give up,” baritone Rod Gilfry intoned in The Loser, composer David Lang’s one-act opera that debuted last week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).