Venue: John Jay College: The Gerald W Lynch Theater, New York City

Rachel Rizzuto reviews Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Boris Charmatz's duet, Partita 2, with violinist Amandine Beyer as part of Lincoln Center's White Light Festival. 

Gotham Chamber Opera's current double bill of Bohuslav Martinů's Alexandre bis and Comedy on the Bridge prove that an opera company doesn’t need to be the biggest in town to be the most innovative.

  Conducted by Neal Goren, the musicians breathed across and blew notelessly into their instruments, creating layers of sounds that grew ever more intriguing as the repetition of the word “nevermore” grew ever more sinister.

“Blood is not water” was one of my grandmother’s frequently quoted proverbs, and it is the first thing that comes to mind, only minutes after my eyes land on Aurélia Thiérrée, as the curtain rises on the opening night performance of Murmurs as part of Lincoln Center Festival 2013.

Toshio Hosokawa’s opera Matsukaze is in many ways a model of modern cross-cultural creation. Premièred in Brussels in 2011, it sets a story from the traditional Japanese Noh theater in a more or less Western operatic framework. And the text is in German.

“I put into your hands manuscripts that I very much wish will remain after me,” wrote Émilie du Châtelet shortly before the birth of her fourth child in 1749. “I hope... that my lying-in, which I am expecting at any moment, will not be fatal, as I fear.” Her fears did prove fatal, and she died days after giving birth, at the age of 42.

It was a glass-smashing, balloon-popping, bearskin-wearing, strip-out-of-your-swimsuit-onstage kind of afternoon at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater for the opening of New York City Opera’s second production of the 2012 season, Mozart’s Così fan tutte.Even for people who’ve seen this opera before, I’ll bet they’ve never seen a Così like this one.

The barely legal lives of women in polygamous marriages may seem like fertile ground for an opera. Dark Sisters, composed by Nico Muhly with a libretto by Stephen Karam, has many attractive moments in music and story, yet demonstrates the difficulties of drawing art from life.