En vivo, Video: Buscador de críticas de conciertos de música clásica, ópera, ballet y danza | Michael Mayer

Michael Mayer’s colorful and busy production of La traviata returned to the Met with a triumphant performance of the title role by soprano Aleksandra Kurzak.

A new production of La Traviata, colorful and conventional, brings little new ideas but is a fine vehicle for a fine performance conducted by Yannick Nezet-Seguin that features a trio of excellent singers.

The cast, sets, costumes and direction of Muhly's opera Marnie impress, but the music somehow falls short of expectations.

A decent cast was unable to redeem a fundamentally dull opera that lacks the psycholgical complexity and tension of both the original Graham novel and its famous Hitchcock adaptation.

The gambling tables and neon lights of Las Vegas might not be the images which immediately enter your head when you think of Verdi’s Rigoletto, but bold art is often created and progressed by the pushing of boundaries and by challenging audiences to reimagine the familiar.

Does it really matter where an opera is set? These days, this question seems to trail Rigoletto. 

I thought it ironic to hear people saying that the Met’s recent production of Two Boys was already outdated because of its ten-year-old subject: Internet chatrooms.

Read our review of Michael Mayer's production of Verdi's Rigoletto in its 2013 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.

Verdi’s Rigoletto is possessed of a truly tragic plot. A physically disabled jester keeps his innocent daughter locked up except for weekly church visits, a situation which she only lightly resists. Rigoletto believes a curse is to blame for his daughter being killed, although she only dies as a substitute for the man Rigoletto himself has arranged to be assassinated.