Exciting, loud Fanciulla opens NYCO season

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

Fallujah, a chamber opera exploring the Iraq War and post-traumatic stress disorder, makes a powerful impression in its East Coast première. 

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.