Musically and visually, the Metropolitan Opera’s first staging of Gioachino Rossini’s Guillaume Tell in over 80 years is a tremendous success.
Opera
Posted inPerformance
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).
Posted inArt
How Chagall, Sendak, Hockney, and Other Artists Staged the Fantasies of ‘The Magic Flute’
As an opera where a colossal snake and enchanted instrument play a pivotal role, perhaps it’s no surprise Mozart’s The Magic Flute inspired some fantastic set and costume designs since its debut in 1791.
Posted inPerformance
An Opera of Love Songs to Science
“Maybe there’s a physicist sitting right beside you, who can explain this better than we do, but we’re in the business of art, so we’ll make a metaphor,” sings Hai-Ting Chinn in Science Fair: An Opera With Experiments.
Posted inPerformance
An Opera About Plucking and Pimping Fallen Angels
The opera Angel’s Bone, having its world premiere at the Prototype festival, opens with a married woman fantasizing about telling her husband that she doesn’t love him.
Posted inPerformance
With Work by Living Composer, Canadian Opera Company Embraces the Edges of Its Art
TORONTO — What do you get when you pair the work of a living composer with that of one from the 17th century?
Posted inArt
Opera in Yellowface Hastily Canceled After Public Outrage
“White people have always slipped in and out of the experiences of people of color and been praised extravagantly for it,” Jenny Zhang, the poet and Rookie magazine contributor, wrote in an article for BuzzFeed about the erasure of Asian American narratives in Western culture.
Posted inArt
As the Met Abandons Blackface, a Look at the Legacy of African Americans in Opera
Inevitably, the history of Black American opera chronicles not just perseverance and accomplishment, but also racism and exclusion.
Posted inArt
An Opera Filmed at the Largest Particle Physics Lab in the World
A movie set amongst the machines of CERN, the world’s largest particle physics facility, considers how both art and science strive to understand the universe, and what it is to be human.
Posted inPerformance
Trading Stage for Warehouse, a New Organization Brings Opera to Brooklyn
The L train was out of order and the night was freezing, but that didn’t stop a crowd from packing into a Bushwick warehouse earlier this month for the last weekend of Puccini’s La Bohème, staged by the Brooklyn-based LoftOpera.
Posted inPerformance
The Public Spectacle of a Personal Opera in LA’s Union Station
LOS ANGELES — A train station is an apt location to tell stories of journeys to lands unknown, particularly when the storytelling method is as unconventional and frontier-pushing as the one deployed in Invisible Cities.
Posted inPerformance
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Anna Nicole Smith
The quick burn of celebrity has rarely been as spectacular as in the rise and fall of Anna Nicole Smith. “She blazed like a comet, as in a shiny thing in the skies, that hangs around a bit, then suddenly dies, ” as the chorus of newscasters intones in the Anna Nicole opera that just ended its raunchy run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
