The real triumph of Michael Fabiano's role debut as Werther lay in controlling the bold intensity of his voice in favour of a sweet and lower-key level of passion – a match for Massenet's frequent choice of the cello.
San Francisco Opera's Die Walküre overcame a disappointing first act, winning the audience over with excellent singing and playing and impressive stage effects.
The quality cast purred, but glorious roars are required to jolt audiences from placid enjoyment of Opera Australia’s gorgeous 24-year-old production of this Verdi classic.
If you love Verdi's inventive music, enjoy fabulous male voices in particular, and appreciate great opera conducting with exquisitely sensitive orchestral playing – then this Rigoletto is a must.
Vittorio Grigòlo and Diana Damrau repeated and cemented their intense on-stage relationship at the Met in Bartlett Sher's new production of Roméo et Juliette.
If the production is full of pleasures, they do not immediately or obviously connect to a sense of some larger plan, which might have been helped along with a more dynamic set.
A well-worked revival of Elijah Moshinsky's production of Rossini's Barber of Seville offers gales of laughter and vocal delights at the Sydney Opera House, with starring roles for Paolo Bordogna, Anna Dowsley and Warwick Fyfe
The Lyric Opera put together the best-sounding première of the year so far, in which singers, chorus and the orchestra all began with astonishing confidence and only improved from there.
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.
There’s nothing like a trip to The Barber to refresh you. This season, the Metropolitan Opera revives Bartlett Sher’s 2006 production of Rossini’s comic masterpiece, The Barber of Seville.
San Francisco Opera's thoughtful version of the 1955 opera Susannah, one of the most performed American operas, placing the story of Susannah and the Elders in the Appalachian hills of the 1930s.
Last night’s Covent Garden revival of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra was a study in time slips. On stage, there is the 25 year slip between the end of the prologue, when Simon is named Doge of Genoa, and the dramatic events of Act I. There is the 24 year gap between the disastrous première of the original opera and the triumph of the heavily revised 1881 version.
The devil, they say, has all the best lines. In yesterday's performance of Verdi's Otello at the Met, the villain was simply sensational. Falk Struckmann's delivery of Jago's Credo in un Dio crudel (“I believe in a cruel God”) was a masterpiece of nihilism, combining power and richness of voice with a tone of pure, matter of fact evil.
