Last November, things weren’t looking too good for Peter Gelb’s Met. The season-opening new production of Tosca had been booed and widely panned, and music director James Levine had made the first of what would turn out to be many health-related cancellations. Doing damage control, Mr. Gelb urged critics and fans to defer judgment. “I Read More
On a cool night in the middle of November, the soprano Aprile Millo gave a recital at Rose Hall in the TimeWarner Center, celebrating her 25th anniversary with Opera Orchestra of New York. It was a strange, intensely moving evening, an effect amplified by my fever and the Dayquil I was freebasing to combat it. Read More
Operagoers got a flashback to 1998 at the Metropolitan Opera last Thursday. It was the beginning of the second act of the Met’s new production of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, directed by Bartlett Sher. The curtain rose on an almost bare stage. Against a background of rich, dark blue, a white panel slowly began to Read More
The crowd for a recent Saturday evening performance of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore at Caramoor Center for Music and Arts, in lush Katonah, N.Y., was older and whiter even than a typical audience at the Metropolitan Opera (and that is pretty darn old and white).
The opera’s star, a young black tenor named Lawrence Brownlee, was Read More
“It wasn’t my intention to get notoriety,” James Jorden said. It was a sunny morning, and he was sitting at a cafe near his home in Woodside, Queens, where he lives with his partner, Carl (“Queens is where all the queens are going now,” he says).
As an avid reader of his Web site about Read More
Would it be a stretch to say that die-hard opera fans are sort of like the music world’s equivalent of "old media." (We wonder how much opera is being purchased on iTunes.) Perhaps not—beginning on Oct. 22 they can get online subscriptions to 120 audio recordings and 50 full-length videos of Metropolitan Opera performances. As Read More
We’ve never seen an opera at the Met. It’s one of those things that has been discussed as a sort of thing-to-do-while-you- live-in-New-York, but since we’ve been here for eleven years, and aren’t going anywhere, what’s the rush? But we’ll admit that we would have been intrigued by the thought of seeing an opera by Read More
The Metropolitan Opera has scrapped its usual summer parks series and replaced it with one big, free concert this year. They booked husband-and-wife team soprano Angela Gheorghiu and tenor Roberto Alagna, who will sing arias and duets by Verdi, Puccini, Donizetti and Massenet in Prospect Park in Brooklyn on June 20, according to Read More
Donizetti’s two-act opera La Fllle Du Regiment will make its transfer from London to the Met next week (the Times across the pond called it and "exceedingly yummy operatic cake”), but you can check out a free dress rehearsal at 11 a.m. on this Friday April 18. Actors including Tony Award winner Marian Seldes, playing Read More
Over the weekend, Franco Zeffirelli, the famed Italian film, opera, and theater director best known for his 1968 film version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, was honored by the Metropolitan Opera for decades of groundbreaking service to the institution. The hosannas culminate today with a luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria. Stars from Mr. Zeffirelli’s Read More
