LEEDS—The Royal Opera aside, and passing respectfully over good work done by smaller outfits like English Touring Opera, most of the publicly supported British opera companies seem locked in a constant struggle with their finances and their … » Read

Challenging the form seems the underlying theme to Opera Philadelphia’s consistently refreshing O19 Festival, and if the U.S. premiere of Philip Venables’s Denis & Katya does that most obviously, the two more conventional … » Read

When the English National Opera performed Porgy and Bess a year ago in a new co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, it was widely predicted that the Met audience would love it. That prediction proved to be spot-on on Monday evening (September … » Read

It’s not fair to say that the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra were peeking at each other’s season-opening plans, but for sure there were strange and wonderful program similarities. Both orchestras have moved … » Read

BERLIN — Booing can be a badge of honor in Germany’s theaters, particularly when it comes to canonical works. That’s at least one way of regarding the vehement reactions that have greeted Frank Castorf’s new staging of La … » Read

If you caught Philip Venables’s opera of Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis at last season’s NYC Prototype Festival, you’ll know he doesn’t fight shy of harrowing subject matter. Yet although Denis & Katya , which … » Read

The idea of a choral setting of the U.S. Constitution sounds like a pretty dry couple of hours. But not only is Benjamin Yarmolinsky’s self-styled “secular oratorio” a cornucopia of catchy themes and variations, in the committed … » Read

With George Enescu’s Oedipe on August 17, my Salzburg opera going of the summer came to an end. Unusually, it was possible to see all of the festival’s new productions—six this year—within the space of a week, and I … » Read

Offerings at the Salzburg Festival are so wide ranging that a uniform theme is often impossible to discern, but this summer its seems to be classical mythology. And what better diversion from the travails of Medea and Oedipus than an Offenbach … » Read

SALZBURG--The Grosses Festpielhaus was the venue for Simon Stone’s new production of Cherubini’s Médée ( Medea ), a less successful exercise in updating (seen on August 16) than the previous evening’s Simon … » Read