Russia’s history in the Pacific deserves to be remembered as much as any other country’s, regardless of its current government’s outrages.
The program gave a splendid overview of ‘America’s Mezzo’ Susan Graham’s legendary career across the operatic firmament as well as in the jazzy tunes of the American Songbook. One only missed her triumphs in the operas of Richard Strauss.
Lohengrin, with its lush music and tragic exploration of trust, betrayal, and forbidden knowledge, has imaginative gifts to offer contemporary audiences. The music still soars, but only to the cave ceiling, not to the skies.
Strauss’s opera prizes innocence in a time of chaos, beauty over disorder, and the transcendence of suffering. Daphne is precisely the work that could lend itself to the revitalization of an opera company.
“The only crime I have committed,” declared former U.S. President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday, “is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it.”
In Europe, revitalized theaters are announcing new seasons that New Yorkers can now only dream about. As New York looks ever more provincial, Paris, Berlin, and Milan are only some of those offering Anna Netrebko in star roles.
A step up from the very literal productions usually seen here, this co-production by Opéra de Monte-Carlo and San Francisco Opera removes the action from its usual eighteenth-century setting to the fateful year of 1914.
This is the Madama Butterfly we know and love—almost to the point of guilty pleasure.
The proverbial excrement hit the fan in Hanover, Germany last week, when the Hanover Opera’s award-winning ballet director and chief choreographer, Marco Goecke, objected in a most peculiar way to bad reviews of his work.
Having withstood the test of time, this fine revival of Dialogues des Carmélites should be a lesson to the Met Opera management as it seeks a new direction.
When the Russian Ball was founded during the Cold War, many Russians in Washington who attended came from the first wave of émigrés who had fled the Revolution to become patriotic Americans fighting against the communist terror that had seized their country.
The nude form is regarded by conservatives, not as pornographic, but as a manifestation of beauty, innocence, and our divine origins. This applies to its representation in Romeo and Juliet, the story of an innocent love crushed by the wicked vanities of a corrupt society.
