Richard Sasanow

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.

“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.

Saying that Giacomo Meyerbeer’s LE PROPHETE is long is like calling the Grand Canyon a pothole: It doesn’t begin to describe the experience, though they both sometimes have a rocky landscape.

The Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center—an unfamiliar name for an orchestra that was around for over half a century, as the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra—and its new maestro, Jonathon Heyward, are playing a role in Lincoln Center’s attempt to draw a more diverse audience to its campus at West 65th Street and Broadway.

If you want to see an opera based on Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet,” head for Gounod’s version of the piece. with its famous waltz and series of duets. Bellini’s I CAPULETI E I MONTECCHI is not it but that's what Will Crutchfield's Teatro Nuovo brought to town this week,

An opera doesn’t have to be totally obscure to catch Will Crutchfield’s bel canto eye—but it couldn’t hurt. ANNA DI RESBURGO (ANNE OF ROXBURGH), the first of the two works on this summer’s schedule of the maestro’s company, Teatro Nuovo, certainly falls into that category.

There was a buzz in the lobby of the opera house and scalpers galore outside the doors to the ticket office for soprano Asmik Grigorian’s recent sell-out concert at the Vienna State Opera. Clearly, it was a night that the audience was waiting for--this first recital at the house by soprano Grigorian, one of today's great international stars.

I couldn’t help but wondering whether the scheduling last week of two recent productions at the Vienna State Opera, Claus Guth’s TURANDOT and Cyril Teste’s SALOME, on subsequent nights had anything more than the availability of the stars behind it. After all, both portrayed the title characters as abused women scarred by powerful men—not exactly the business-as-usual for these works by Puccini and Strauss, respectively—in pared-down productions that hearkened to the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, as well as to #MeToo.

Perhaps it’s only fitting in a town that’s known for art, music and psychoanalysis (and maybe a little whipped cream on the side), that the Vienna State Opera’s production of Puccini’s TURANDOT—with the stunning soprano Asmik Grigorian in the title role—features a traumatized characterization of the title role, with the fine Russian tenor Ivan Gyngazov as Calaf.

Considering all the productions in the Met’s repertoire that have been conceived (or, perhaps more justly, concocted) by directors from other media who don’t seem to understand or like opera, Mark Morris is a gem. So is his concept for Gluck’s ORFEO ED EURIDICE, the myth of a man who is permitted to go to the land of the dead to retrieve his beloved wife, which was seen in a revival that opened the other night with countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and soprano Ying Fang in the title roles.

“Why did I enlist? Why did I go to war?” are but two of the questions that Private Danny Chen asks himself in the powerful docu-opera, AN AMERICAN SOLDIER, by Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang. It was directed thoughtfully and surely by Chay Yew in its New York debut Sunday afternoon at the new Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC-NYC) at the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.

When I first heard Kevin Puts’s gorgeous, melodic score for THE HOURS back in 2022, I was blown away, thinking it was almost too good to be true. Could it be a classic? I wanted to hear it again, though not too soon, to give it a chance to settle in its own skin. Lucky us—lucky me—that the Met brought it back so quickly. It reminded me that first impressions are sometimes on the mark.

“A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,” according to Disney’s “Mary Poppins.” The same thing seems to go for politics and the arts, if you look at things like the new musical SUFFS, which is being given a bang-up production these days at the Music Box theatre on West 45 off Broadway about the fight by suffragists for the right to vote, regardless of sex. The other night, the Working Families Party—which works outside the usual two-party political system with individuals, and partners in unions, community organizations and social movements—held a talkback joined by several of SUFFS' creative team, talking about how theatre and other arts forms are bringing history and current events to a broader audience by being entertaining as well as newsworthy.

Those of us who keep an eye on the comings and goings of singers at major opera houses around the world, have known that Friday’s debutant, Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian, was going to be one to watch. And it was. No worries about whether her voice would translate from Europe’s smaller houses to the Met’s enormous hall: Grigorian may have been singing Puccini’s Cio-Cio-San/Madama Butterfly this time around, but she’s a well-schooled Lady Macbeth and Turandot as well, bringing a notably large voice with her. She survived the Met’s notoriously short rehearsal time for revivals (particularly for the second cast of the season). Lastly, she even made it through the final curveball, when tenor Jonathan Tetelman became ill and standby Chad Shelton had to take over as Pinkerton; he did well considering the circumstances, but he was no match for her.