When the Metropolitan Opera last did La Clemenza di Tito seven years ago, I thought the time had come for a new production. Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s 1984 treatment of Mozart’s last opera, together with his companion production of … » Read

LONDON--Ian Bell’s new opera, Jack the Ripper , given its world premiere by English National Opera at the London Coliseum on Mar. 30, demands to be taken seriously. Not that the story of a real-life serial killer of prostitutes is ever … » Read

LOS ANGELES--The Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, now in its fifth season, is a good group, an interesting group, and an entertaining group. It works without a conductor, and mostly benefits from that decision. A Sunday afternoon performance … » Read

In the lead up to the Metropolitan Opera’s current revival of Der Ring des Nibelungen , the company went to a lot of trouble ironing out technical problems that had plagued Robert Lepage’s production of the Wagner tetralogy, last seen … » Read

LONDON—Narratively inferior to both Simon Boccanegra and Don Carlos , works that sit either side of it in Verdi’s chronology, La Forza del Destino is as hokey a tale as he ever set. It’s more a concatenation of coincidences than … » Read

Saturday night (March 23) at David Geffen Hall, continued over the road at 10:30pm in the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse, was a case of smart programming. For starters, pairing John Adams’s searing, introspective The Wound Dresser with Charles … » Read

Opera and surrealism make strange bedfellows, yet they have been known to cohabit, sometimes productively. Take Shostakovich’s The Nose , Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel and Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre , for instance. They may not be … » Read

There was a definite buzz in the air for the second of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Carnegie Hall concerts on March 20. Reviews suggested Kirill Gerstein had scored a major hit a fortnight earlier on the BSO’s home turf with the … » Read

Some 60 years ago, when I was in college, I passed out programs for the Boston Symphony’s Friday matinees. I chose program passing over ushering since ushers had to spend a third of the concert out in the halls, in case of emergencies, … » Read

BERKELEY, CA--Anticipation couldn’t have been running much higher when Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra of London, arrived in Berkeley last weekend. With three programs on the schedule, Friday evening through Sunday … » Read