Richard Sasanow

While opera-lovers wait eagerly for soprano Julia Bullock’s appearance in the latest John Adams lyric drama, ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA at the Met in May, Bullock continues to tantalize us with some other parts of her repertoire, from the Baroque (her recent program with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment) to this past Tuesday’s entry in Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series, HISTORY’S PERSISTENT VOICE, filled with songs and readings about enslavement and incarceration.

The people at Heartbeat Opera--that dazzling reinvention-machine for taking works that you think you might have heard one time too often and making them compelling--must have had a crystal ball when they programmed Strauss’s SALOME long before the current, decadent regime took control in US politics.

Michael Hersch took no prisoners with his new opera, AND WE, EACH, a production of the Baltimore musical organization, Mind on Fire, which had its New York premiere on February 6 at National Sawdust in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Anyone who’s spent enough time watching network TV knows an American criminal justice system that is built around simplistic stories of the good guys (hard-working prosecutors and police detectives) putting away the bad guys (“perps” of all stripes) with the help of brilliant DNA evidence that points the way to the truth. That’s not exactly the impression that we get from BLIND INJUSTICE—the opera by composer Scott Davenport Richards and librettist David Cote that had its New York debut this week.

Even though there’s no shortage of contemporary opera around, we all still long for the rediscovery of a delightful operatic work from the archives, particularly a comedy, of which there is a short supply. Would Opera Philadelphia’s THE ANONYMOUS LOVER (L’AMANT ANONYME)--by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George, a contemporary of Mozart, with libretto by Francois-Georges Fouques Deshayes, Desfontaines--fit the bill? Hope sprang eternal, for me at least.

ARIANA MATER, the opera by Kaija Saariaho, who died last summer at 70, won this year's Grammy for Best Opera Recording, for the Deutsche Grammophon recording issued last August. With its libretto by Amin Maalouf, the production by Peter Sellars features the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus under Esa-Pekka Salonen and mezzo Fleur Barron in the title role.

The 17th and 18th centuries rode roughshod over the programming at the 92NY the other night, when that brilliant British baroque ensemble, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and superb guest soloist, soprano Julia Bullock, bathed the audience in the warmth of what itself acknowledged was a lineup of ‘chestnuts.’

The New York premiere of the Christopher Cerrone/Stephanie Fleischmann opera IN A GROVE, in Mary Birnbaum’s simply beautiful—or beautifully simple—production triumphed at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club on Saturday as part of the Prototype Festival. It is inspired by Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s classic story (best known from its film version, “Rashomon”).

The lobby of the HERE Theatre in SoHo was buzzing after Saturday’s performance of the new opera EAT THE DOCUMENT—not just for the performance we’d just watched but for the memories of the age that the piece evoked for many in the audience. Based on the novel of the same name by Dana Spiotta, DOCUMENT is a story of the ‘70s underground, with its activism, and a tale of sacrifice and living a secret.

New York’s annual PROTOTYPE Festival—produced by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, which has been showcasing visionary, nontraditional opera-theatre and music-theatre pieces since 2013—kicked off its 2025 edition on January 9 followed by BLACK LODGE/BARDO, IN A GROVE, POSITIVE VIBRATION NATION, AROOJ AFTAB: NIGHT REIGN, ART BATH, through January 19.

Someone at the Met should have been giving out flu shots (before RFK Junior makes them illegal), because something is obviously going around the cast of the new AIDA. They should have handed out a scorecard to help the audience keep track of who-was-who.

Richard Strauss’s DIE FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN (THE WOMAN WITHOUT A SHADOW), with a libretto by his long-time collaborator, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, has made a triumphant return to the Met with a stellar cast and the Met Orchestra in peak form under Yannick Nezet-Seguin. It dazzled and glowed like few other evenings in recent memory, in a production by Herbert Wernicke, who died young, not long after its debut in 2001.

As usual, the gala concert of the Richard Tucker Music Foundation started off with an interloper from the golden age of opera: Richard Tucker himself, singing Mascagni’s “Addio alla Madre” from CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA. A tough act to follow for those singing live at Carnegie Hall, but happily no one seemed daunted by it. That doesn’t mean everything went smoothly at the gala concert, which is par for the course of the annual event. Despite the prestige of the Richard Tucker Awards, the world doesn’t stop when the Tucker Foundation comes a calling.

I must admit that the Met’s current revival of IL TROVATORE--with RIGOLETTO and TRAVIATA, considered the great creations of Verdi’s middle period--made me think of another masterwork, “A Night at the Opera,” my favorite of the movies by those champions of silliness, the Marx Brothers.

Osvaldo Golijov’s AINADAMAR, which made its Met debut this week, with a libretto translated by the composer from the English original by David Henry Hwang, isn’t the first Spanish language opera at the Met, but it’s certainly the first to sound that way. Read the review.

“This is not a cathartic tragedy or a tale of noble sacrifice. There are no admirable characters here, no moral lesson, no redemption, and no silver lining. There is only a merciless depiction of society’s dark side,” say the Met’s program notes for RIGOLETTO. I’m not so sure.

It’s fascinating that within two weeks, as the new US opera season began in earnest, Northeast operagoers heard a pair of new (or new-ish) operas by well-known creators: the US premiere of THE LISTENERS at Opera Philadelphia, by Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek and the much-revised GROUNDED by Jeanine Tesori and George Brant, the gala opening night at the Met.

The Met performed the season’s first TALES OF HOFFMANN (LES CONTES D’HOFFMANN), by Jacques Offenbach, with libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carre, also a Sher production, and it was a different story.

A match made in heaven? Girl meets boy. Girl meets baby. Girl meets drone. Girl meets court-martial.

Kelley Rouke was driving when she received a text from Mark Campbell informing her that she was the winner of Opera America’s 2024 Campbell Opera Librettist Prize. Her reaction? She answered, “Stop it! It’s mean. Never joke about that!” because she couldn’t quite digest that she’d been chosen for the prize. “There are so many people doing great work that I couldn’t believe I’d been singled out,” she modestly insists.