It’s hard to imagine how three minutes of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro repeated for 12 hours can be so riveting.
Opera
Posted inPerformance
A Celebration of Opera Affirms Its Relevance
From a monologue on death to a story about a police shootout, Opera Philadelphia’s productions showed us the many things opera can be.
Posted inArt
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.
Posted inPerformance
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.
Posted inPerformance
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.
Posted inArt
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.
Posted inPerformance
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.
Posted inPerformance
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.
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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.
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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.
Posted inPerformance
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.
Posted inPerformance
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.