A performance? An art installation? Or a secular ritual fashioned for the post-pandemic 21st century? All definitions loosely apply, but especially the ritual definition in Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), a new work playing at New York’s … » Read

SAN FRANCISCO  — John Adams has not tired of defying expectations. Nowhere is this more evident than in his works for the stage, which tend to trigger the most heated, even contradictory, critical reactions. Antony and Cleopatra , his … » Read

The title role of Medea must be one of opera’s most challenging, and when Cherubini’s 1797 work finally arrived at the Met Opera on Tuesday for the beginning of the company’s 137 th season, Sondra Radvanovsky triumphantly met … » Read

LONDON—When it comes to the Royal Opera’s Verdi, gray is the new Technicolor. The rot set in nine years ago with a Nabucco of the utmost dreariness, a gloom surpassed in 2016 by its most recent Il trovatore . However, with this new … » Read

Puccini’s La bohème , a staple of the opera world for more than a century, begins with a budding romance and concludes with a tragic death. What would happen, wondered the iconoclastic director Yuval Sharon, if the story was told in … » Read

LONDON—Last year, Edward Gardner  opened the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s season with Michael Tippett’s glorious, yet rarely performed opera, The Midsummer Marriage . If that proved the incoming principal … » Read

After a two-year hiatus, Opera Philadelphia is back with Festival 022. The opening night was Toshio Hosokawa’s ten-year-old operatic theater piece, The Raven , based on Edgar Allen Poe’s 18-stanza poem. Eschewing social distancing, … » Read

CARDIFF, WALES — A fable of lawyers and lovers, music and magic… On one level, Janácek’s yarn about a woman who outlives her natural lifespan by hundreds of years is a gothic opera of dark whimsy; on another it’s a … » Read

LONDON--There’s quite a vogue for investigating Offenbach’s later operettas, with a pair of pioneering companies leading the way. On the continent, you have Venice-based Palazzetto Bru Zane delivering fine reassessments on disc of La … » Read

CHICAGO—Barrie Kosky’s much-talked about, lovingly exuberant production of Fiddler on the Roof bounded into Chicago’s Lyric Opera House Saturday night. If downtown Chicago’s stately opera house were in Times Square and we … » Read