Learning to listen: Fallujah brings the Iraq War to the opera stage

In the Brokeback Mountain, Wuorinen's  powerfully depicts the stern landscapes, the omnipresent menace, the desolate life of the characters and their awkward interactions.

Whenever a relative opera novice or occasional toe-dipper tells me how he or she cried at the end of La bohème, I want to send them to La fanciulla del West. Of course I choke up at the end of Bohème – who doesn't? – but for a good bawling session, the fabulously maudlin finale of Fanciulla is the place to be. The plot doesn't bode well.

A rare pairing of Rachmaninov's Aleko and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci was the first première of the New York City Opera's 2016-2017 season.

Musically inoffensive, the soaring Romanticism further makes sense given the story, in which a cast of García-Márquezian characters float down the Amazon River on a steamboat rife with passion and yearning.

During the opening night of Anna Nicole at BAM, I found myself experiencing a case of déjà vu. New York City Opera was electrifying the Howard Gilman Opera House with a work by a living composer featuring the salacious story of a female protagonist whose life was splashed across tabloids, and at one point even featuring an act of fellatio with the disjointed music carrying on in the background.

Henri Bergson famously defined comedy as “something mechanical encrusted on the living”. One suspects that Jacques Offenbach would have been a fan of this definition, and that Christopher Alden most certainly is.