The new production of Tristan und Isolde is the Met’s hottest ticket of the year, and with good reason. The company has not presented Tristan in a decade––far too long, considering the work’s seminal importance. Isolde is … » Read

MILAN—By the midpoint of the first of La Scala’s two full Ring   cycles (March 1-7 and 10-15), it was clear audiences were witnessing something special. As mentioned in the review of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre , the cast … » Read

Each year the Berkeley-based West Edge Opera’s “Snapshot” selects pairs of composers and librettists to workshop new pieces with a team of experienced advisers, a strong cast, and musicians over a two-week period.  This … » Read

Something old, something new. In February, the creative team for a fresh  Pelléas et Mélisande  at Opéra Monte-Carlo reunited, likely for the last time, colleagues who have shared a long history there. For … » Read

MILAN—From Vienna to Bayreuth, several of Europe’s leading opera houses are mounting full Ring cycles to mark this year’s 150th anniversary of the tetralogy’s premiere. At La Scala, performances of the four-opera epic are … » Read

CHICAGO—Every moment ought to be Kurt Weill’s, but especially this one. Whether working in cabaret or opera, the exiled German–Jewish composer was one of music theater’s great truthtellers: a craver of complexity, an ally … » Read

LONDON—With the exception of his Cantus Arcticus , the music of Einojuhani Rautavaara has been unfairly neglected outside of his native Finland in the ten years since his death in 2016. It was rewarding, then, to hear the first of his three … » Read

LOS ANGELES – Los Angeles Opera was among the first opera companies in North America to present all three of Philip Glass’s “portrait operas,”  Einstein on the Beach (2013), Akhnaten (2016), and Satyagraha … » Read

There is an trend among symphony orchestras toward presenting semi-staged or concert operas. Certainly they cost less than in the opera house, which require the full complement of sets, costumes, lighting, and other stage business. There can also … » Read

Composers, even those most attuned to music’s future, are constantly in conversation with the past. This past weekend, the New York Philharmonic presented a program bound together by musical allusion, direct and indirect, one composer to … » Read