On Sunday, a new opera by Beat Furrer, “Das grosse Feuer” (“The Great Fire”), premiered at the Zurich Opera House. Directed by Tatjana Gürbaca and based on a novel by the Argentine author Sara Gallardo, the work, also conducted by Furrer, tells the story of an Indigenous shaman named Eisejuaz, whose community and individual being […]
Tag: Opera
Posted inReview
Black Swan
Ours is an age of anti-heroes. In art and entertainment, knights in shining armor are out; we prefer tortured mobsters, spoiled scions, or people on the edge. Now, a sterling example of a romantic lead has been upstaged in his own opera once again. Lohengrin, the holy grail keeper who according to lore descends on […]
Posted inInterview
Useful Music
Composer, conductor and facilitator Michael Betteridge’s music sometimes moves like the ocean. In his reworking of Vaughan Williams’ one-act opera, “Riders to the Sea,” he stripped the orchestration to its emotional essence, replacing rich string textures with oboe, accordion, and bass clarinet. His new prologue was bold and theatrical as Bartley, silhouetted against a sea […]
Posted inReport
Behind the Screens
In 1972, Elayne Jones got her dream job. Within two years, it had become a nightmare. When she won the principal timpani seat of the San Francisco Symphony, Jones became the first Black principal player in any major American orchestra, as well as the first Black woman and, at the time, the only rostered Black […]
Posted inInterview
Human Tension
Peter Sellars is one of today’s most innovative theater and opera directors. From his daring early work, including a famous / infamous Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy, which included a “Don Giovanni” set in East Harlem and a “Nozze di Figaro” in Trump Tower, to his groundbreaking Salzburg production of Messiaen’s “Saint François d’Assise” and through to […]
Posted inOpinion
Trump: The Opera
The performing arts field tends to move slowly; Donald Trump does not. Last Friday, he announced that he would be taking over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.; by Monday, he had dismissed a number of board members and installed a new interim executive director, Richard Grenell; and on Wednesday, he […]
Posted inBreaking
A Freedom to Dream
Few classical music organizations in the United States are as vulnerable to the new “patriotic” diktats of President Donald Trump’s arts policy as White Snake Projects. Founded in 2018 by Cerise Lim Jacobs, a retired lawyer turned librettist, the Boston-based indie opera company’s mission is explicitly activist, with a longstanding emphasis on racial and cultural […]
Posted inInterview
Exploratory Shapes
The career of soprano Lucy Shelton has been shaped by exploration. Shelton, a contemporary music specialist who has premiered works by Knussen, Carter and Grisey, continues to prove that musical curiosity outweighs perceptions of age. Looking to the 2025-26 season, she’ll make her Metropolitan Opera company debut, in Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” aged 82. I sat […]
Posted inOpinion
Your Tiny Hand Is Invisible
Last week, English National Opera’s plans for Greater Manchester were unveiled in the Holden Gallery of Manchester Metropolitan University. The room was filled with many of the city region’s most powerful players. Sir Richard Leese, the former council leader who oversaw Manchester’s rapid regeneration after the IRA bombing in 1996, received a shoutout from the […]
Posted inReview
On Shame
Shame effaces itself; shame points and projects; shame turns itself skin side out; shame and pride, shame and dignity, shame and self-display, shame and exhibitionism are different linings of the same glove. Shame, it might finally be said, transformational shame, is performativity. —Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling 1. Two things about shame. First: it is […]