Articles by Robert Levine

A revival of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore at the Met, where Vittorio Grigolo's Nemorino happily ignores most of Bartless Sher's subtexts. 

The combination of Esa-Pekka Salonen and the New York Philharmonic, in the first of three evenings devoted solely to Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie proved riveting and exhilarating. 

A brilliant revival of Donizetti's Maria Stuarda at The Met centres on the dramatic confrontation between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart at Fotheringhay. 

The Met’s revival of David McVicar’s year-old take on the perennial Verismo twins strikes out emotionally in Cavalleria rusticana but scores high in Pagliacci. Working on the same set by Rae Smith, flanked by the forbidding stone walls of the town church, Cavalleria is dark, dark, dark – the very picture of a poor, unhappy Sicilian hill town.

Les Pêcheurs de Perles is a graceful if senseless piece, composed when Georges Bizet was only 25 years old and miles away from the psycho-musical drama of Carmen.

Andris Nelsons, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Christine Goerke give a breathtaking, frenzied performance of Strauss's hate-filled opera, whose score still jars today.

David McVicar's six-year old production of Il trovatore returns to the Met with a starry cast:a model of clarity and mood compared with the Met’s previous staging.

The Met's Turandot remains a grand spectacle, worthy of the opera itself, with a cast rightly earnsing the wild ovation it received.

Bartlett Sher’s new production of Verdi's Otello opens the Metropolitan Opera's season in a staging dominated by multimedia sets.

First seen at the innovative, fearless Aix-en-Provence festival three summers ago, George Benjamin’s riveting, grisly Written on Skin has arrived in New York. 

Bard SummerScape made musical history by presenting the first full staging of British composer Ethel Smyth’s opera The Wreckers. Born in 1858 and dying in 1944, Smyth was celebrated in her day (John Singer Sargent painted her portrait in 1901) not only for her compositions, but for being an openly bisexual member of the suffrage movement.

Attention to clarity and detail without fussiness is a wonderful thing in the presentation of a Rossini comic opera, and Opera Saratoga in upstate New York scored a triumph with their new production of La Cenerentola by assembling a fine all-around team.

New York’s three year old, wonderfully innovative On Site Opera, has scored another success with a four-performance run of Giovanni Paisiello’s 1782 Il barbiere di Siviglia. 

All five of the Houston Grand Opera’s performances of Die Walküre sold out immediately – more than 13,000 seats – and there are several good reasons why.

The two leads in the brand-new cast of the Met’s three year old production of Massenet’s Manon were unbeatable. 

Roman mythology bumps into Buddhism, not always comfortably, in Zhang Huan’s production of Handel’s Semele at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

A menacing rather than a bucolic setting for The Met's new production of La donna del lago, but the proof is in the singing... 

The Metropolitan Opera’s five-year old production of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann returned to the repertoire with a remarkable undertaking of the title role by Vittorio Grigolo.

Willy Decker’s 2010 bleak, fascinating, controversial production of La traviata has returned to the Met with an entirely new cast.

After a six week hiatus, the Metropolitan Opera's new Le nozze di Figaro has returned, with a new cast and conductor.