SAN FRANCISCO—San Francisco Opera’s Fidelio arrived nearly overloaded with expectations. Originally planned as last season’s inaugural production to celebrate the choice of Eun Sun Kim as new music director, the show had to be … » Read

LONDON--With Davóne Tines, a concert is always an event. In his program biography, the American bass-baritone describes himself as “a Black, gay performer at the intersection of many histories, cultures and aesthetics.” As an … » Read

LONDON--It’s neither musical fish nor theatrical fowl this Fidelio , and Glyndebourne doesn’t seem to have known what to do with it. Frederic Wake-Walker’s production is a misfire so complete that the word … » Read

As a part of the current changing of the guard at London’s major orchestras, the appointment of the 35-year-old Santtu-Matias Rouvali to succeed Esa-Pekka Salonen as principal conductor of the Philharmonia was certainly the most daring. On … » Read

Premiered at France’s Royal Academy of Music in 1779, Iphigénie en Tauride was among the last of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s “reform” operas, a series of innovative and highly successful works that strived for … » Read

For the 41 years it’s been open, Davies Symphony Hall has never sounded or looked like it did on Friday, October 1. The occasion was the San Francisco Symphony’s brilliantly conceived and realized 2021-22 season “Re-Opening … » Read

Shortened versions of operas have found a certain vogue during the pandemic, ostensibly for health reasons. Usually it is the director who does the shortening, but at least one operatic standard exists in a version created by the composer that is … » Read

How to unwrap a musical package as deep, layered, and startlingly resonant as Fire Shut Up in My Bones , the work that opened the Metropolitan Opera Monday night after 18 months of pandemic-induced silence? The sheer substance of Terence … » Read

"Keep it pretty, keep it shallow, keep it moving" is the stated credo of drag artist Justin Vivian Bond at the start of Only an Octave Apart , a cabaret collaboration with countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn … » Read

LONDON--“All things fall and are built again, and those that build them again are gay.” The words, from W.B. Yeats’s poem Lapis Lazuli , were borrowed by Michael Tippett to conclude his audacious first opera The Midsummer … » Read