Live, Video: Kritiken zu klassischen Konzerten, Opern, Ballett und Tanz finden | Peter J. Davison

Jonathan Miller's modish production returns to The Metropolitan Opera with three leads who are absolutely right. 

Francesca Zambello sets the whole opera as a flashback, showing, during the prelude, the heroine surrounded by doctors and nurses in a sanatorium for patients dying from tuberculosis.

A strong new Traviata from Washington National Opera with the welcome house debut of Venera Gimadieva as a fabulous Violetta.

Zambello's politically re-'woke' West Side Story comes to Kansas.

Seattle Opera's memorable Porgy and Bess excels with an exceptional cast who performed with utmost sympathy for their roles.

Glimmerglass’ Porgy and Bess proves one more time that Gershwin’s opus remains America’s most important 20th-century opera.

Marco Tutino's Two Women at San Francisco Opera feels lacking in musical originality and its out-of-date accompanying taste of re-heated Italian verismo comes a little over-cooked.

A bearded lady and her taxidermied shark are just two eccentric characters livening up Stravinsky’s 1951 moral fable The Rake’s Progress, though the shark is unique to Jonathan Miller’s revived production. 

The marriage between performers and score here is perfect, because Gershwin’s text-setting is near-miraculous, somehow every word is clear and seems to be naturally inflected by the curvature of the musical line.